This is the year in which a fictional protagonist of the esport-themed online Chinese novel The King's Avatar, Ye Xiu, was named a Swiss Tourism Pathfinder of 2025 by the Swiss National Tourism Board as part of a promotion in conjunction with the Yuewen Group's strategy to boost its global intellectual property.

Online literature is nothing new in China where audiences are used to TV series, films and cartoons being adapted from online serial novels. It has been more than 20 years since the literary form, an industry worth 38.3 billion yuan ($5.25 billion) last year, according to a report released by the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association on Dec 16, took root in the country in 1998.

Although the final chapter of the esport novel wrapped up in 2014, it has attracted 135 million readers outside China since an English version appeared in 2017 on WebNovel, a Chinese platform run by Yuewen Group, for international online literature and translations.

In addition to translations of Chinese novels, a group of online writers of multiple nationalities have been contributing to the flourishing online literature scene, which netizens describe as one of four cultural phenomena along with Hollywood movies, Japanese cartoons and comics, and South Korean TV series.

Kawin Jack Sherwin tasted sweet success four years ago and is now enjoying the extension of that success through adaptations into other forms, including audiobooks and comics.

The 28-year-old author of one of Web-Novel's top English-language titles, My Vampire System, which he wrote under the pen name JKSManga, comes from Slough in the United Kingdom.

In 2020, he won the $10,000 Gold Prize in the WebNovel Spirity Awards. Now, audio versions in English, Hindi and German have received 243 million hits so far, according to Qin Lei, vice-president of the Yuewen Group.

"I thought the popularity of my stories would stop growing at some point, that things would slow down. After all, how could things get better than being ranked No 1?" Sherwin says. "Yet the story has done better than ever. Now, because of the audio, people I've never met are hearing and enjoying my work, including friends who didn't even know I wrote it.

"What I'm seeing is a focus on bigger IPs that are recognized worldwide," he says, adding this second boost to his writing shows the momentum gaining among foreign online writers.

"Because we follow the Chinese way of operating IPs, we avoid making mistakes," Sherwin says.

With no professional training as a writer, Sherwin quit his job as a music teacher in a Hangzhou school in Zhejiang province to devote himself to online writing in 2020. He said in a previous interview with China Daily that his decision to combine the techniques employed for Harry Potter and Sun Wukong (the Monkey King) provided the answer to how he could impress someone with his story in 30 seconds.

Able to quickly learn and analyze other popular online novels, which he reads a lot, he was even thinking about how to apply storytelling techniques to his work when he was dragged by his Chinese wife to a costume drama. The couple met in the Hangzhou school and live in Qingdao in Shandong province.

His online editor at WebNovel, a Singaporean known as JJ, tells China Daily: "My Vampire System was one of a kind during publication as there was no other novel that offered the same premise and storyline during its serialization. It was a mixture of sci-fi and fantasy themes that the author managed to blend together, where you have people with fantastical superpowers fighting against alien invaders in a futuristic setting."

In the 5-million-word novel, the "system" and "leveling up" elements used in Chinese online literature work in harmony with vampire legends and interstellar sci-fi settings.

Instead of pushing his limits every day by rising at 4 am to write, Sherwin says he is now relaxed, though he still writes 4,000 words a day between 9 am and 5 pm, gym time included.

With five titles under his belt, he is awaiting the publication of his Vampire book in comic form in Chinese, English and Japanese, and would like to explore more of China with his wife, as well as cater to his growing German fan groups, he says.

Sherwin is among the 449,000 overseas online writers on WebNovel who have written 680,000 titles, says Li Hong from the audio-video and digital publishing association, referring to the report on 2024 Chinese online literature overseas trends, which was released during the Third Shanghai International Online Literature Week from Dec 16 to 19.

Li says overseas writers born after the year 2000 account for 45 percent of those writers, and in 2023, 411 titles were viewed more than 10 million times. The hot labels are action, adventure, romance, rebirth and system.

Unlike Sherwin, whose father brought him up on Asian, especially Chinese, dramas and books as a child, Lucia Ewoenam Oniong Ekanem, a 36-year-old from Ghana, became interested in translated Chinese online literature in 2019 during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Under the pen name Glorious_Eagle, she writes online romances about strong women with alpha male husbands that provide her with an escape from the bitterness she feels toward living with a stepmother as a child. The mother of two made a name with The President's Pregnant, Ex-Wife, and most recently worked on Two Times Rejected Luna, which concluded in early December.

"As someone whose first language is not English, I conducted extensive research before publishing anything, with the plot being the most crucial aspect," she says, recalling her first experience of writing on WebNovel as a learning journey in which everything felt new, including the readers' responses.

"To be honest, it has brought about significant changes in my life and for my family," she says.

Ekanem knows the daily update routine well, much like her Chinese peers. "Never miss updates and be prepared," she says. "This may seem difficult, but I have applied it during tough times in my life while battling illness and domestic challenges."

Barisbi Alborov, a Russian writer who goes by the online pen name Guiltythree, was recently in Shanghai during the literature week to collect the award of High Potential Overseas IP for Shadow Slave. Formerly a game writer, he says his favor for Chinese and Korean dramas, as well as science fiction, led him to try writing online.

"My first novel failed terribly and I gave myself six months to see if I could earn enough to feed myself," Alborov says. In five months, Shadow Slave became a hit, and fans draw illustrations or make audio content based on the novel.

He says the secret is to learn from other writers.

Besides adaptations, online novels in multiple foreign languages, whether by writers in or outside of China, are sources of inspiration for artists.

Italian stage designer and multidisciplinary creative director Carlo Maria Rossi took to Lord of Mysteries, one of the 26 Chinese web novels added into the British Library's collection, to create an immersive space of art and shows.

"The beauty of Chinese online literature transcends the (physical) limitations of traditional literature, helping to break cultural barriers to resonate with readers around the world," he says. "Themes like the pursuit of dreams and the fight for justice are universal, uniting people across cultures."

Hou Xiaonan, chief executive officer and president of the Yuewen Group, says the overseas presence of Chinese online literature has increased 30 percent. With the assistance of AI translation, new language markets are emerging, including Japanese, Spanish, French, Brazilian and German. The Japanese market has grown by 180 percent year-on-year.

Sherwin uses AI as a tool for coming up with character names, which poses a real headache for some online writers, and doesn't consider AI a serious threat to "writers of our generation".