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Our aim is one and one only: to have people read, write and translate.
Novelle Leggere is an Italian writing-and-translation Platform that resembles a literary equivalent of Netflix. It can be regarded as Literature-as-a-Service (LaaS) that will offer web novels for purchase in form of single chapters, although a percentage ranging from 30% to 70% of the novel will be free. At the moment, it relies on a **subscription model on Patreon.**
<aside> đź’ˇ Exact percentages will be based on future data-analysis for profit margin. Full novels will not be available for sale, whereas single chapters will be purchasable through microtransactions and digital currency.
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The outset of Novelle Leggere dates back to 2016, when web novels first began to gain traction outside their birthplace, China, to spread all over the world. By starting Novelle Leggere, we aimed to import the same model on Italian soil. As data below show, the idea seems to be a winning one.
<aside> 💡 By “web novel”, we define a product whose creation and fruition was born to be web-enclosed.
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<aside> 💡 Web novels are published by digital publishers. Qidian (subsidiary of China Reading, Tencent) is the biggest web novel publisher in China. The biggest English publishers are Wattpad, Webnovel (Qidian-owned) and Wuxiaworld. These platforms don’t merely make a distributor as for example Kindle, but are rather content-creators that could rely on Kindle as well as on any other service to sell their product. Common features and shared values in Webnovel, Wattpad and Wuxiaworld represents the biggest divergence from Kindle's model.
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In 2017, the specialized market segment concerning the Chinese most innovative web novels reached a market value amounting to $1.3 billion. It must be clear that this segment gained traction through a completely new literary genre.
<aside> đź’ˇ The 2014-2015 Annual Survey of China's Digital Publishing Industry revealed that China's digital publishing industry reported revenue of 338.77 billion yuan in 2014, an increase of 33.36% from that in 2013. Revenue from digital publishing as a proportion of the total news publishing industry rose to 17.1% from 13.9% in 2013. In particular, online periodical revenue amounted to 1.43 billion yuan; e-books, 4.5 billion yuan; digital newspapers, 1.05 billion yuan; blogs, 3.32 billion yuan; online music, 5.24 billion yuan; and online animation, 3.8 billion yuan. Mobile publishing and online game revenues amounted to 78.49 billion yuan and 86.94 billion yuan, respectively, corresponding to 23.17% and 25.66% of total digital publishing revenue, or an aggregate of 48.83% of total, highlighting the fact that mobile publishing and network games remain the dominant force in driving digital publishing revenue. This indicates that leisure and entertainment products account for a considerable share of the digital publishing industry
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<aside> 💡 According to the Annual Survey of China’s Digital Publishing Industry (quoted by Chinese Book Market Data (2017)), revenue of digital publishing was 440.39 billion yuan (around 69 billion USD) in 2015. This revenue does not only include eBooks but digital newspapers, blogs, online music, and animation. The biggest portion came from “mobile publishing” (16 billion USD) and games (13 billion USD).
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Based on the valuations of Netflix, Spotify and their rivals, you’d assume that music and video are where the biggest revenues are. But in fact both Hollywood and the global music industry are dwarfed by video games. In 2016, global revenues from games topped $101 billion – that’s a lot more than the global revenues from music and movies combined.
Mobile gaming alone, as concluded above in the callout, will probably overcome movies and music revenue in China; also, being mobile publishing more profitable than mobile gaming - assuming that investors will buy into these ideas, which they did not for the moment, at least in Italy - it's only logic to think that this indeed IS a very profitable market segment.
This should be enough for us to state that it is possible to build a parallel-market for mobile publishers based on an untraditional business model outside Asia. It is therefore possible to compete with the traditional models and overcome their limiting framework to produce much bigger profits and bigger opportunities for writers and readers.