The Secret to Popular Chinese Web Novels: A Corpus-Driven Study

What is the secret to writing popular novels? The issue is an intriguing one among researchers from various fields. The goal of this study is to identify the linguistic features of several popular web novels as well as how the textual features found within and the overall tone interact with the genre and themes of each novel. Apart from writing style, non-textual information may also reveal details behind the success of web novels. Since web fiction has become a major industry with top writers making millions of dollars and their stories adapted into published books, determining essential elements of “publishable” novels is of importance. The present study further examines how non-textual information, namely, the number of hits, shares, favorites, and comments, may contribute to several features of the most popular published and unpublished web novels. Findings reveal that keywords, function words, and lexical diversity of a novel are highly related to its genres and writing style while dialogue proportion shows the narration voice of the story. In addition, relatively shorter sentences are found in these novels. The data also reveal that the number of favorites and comments serve as significant predictors for the number of shares and hits of unpublished web novels, respectively; however, the number of hits and shares of published web novels is more unpredictable. 2012 ACM Subject Classification