Ping Liu, Copyright Manager, Tianjin Chinese-World Books Inc., Peking, China

Frankfurt Book Fair: What drew you to working in the publishing industry?

Ping Liu: The publishing industry is full of creativity, wisdom, thoughts, ideas, communication and things like that. By working in this industry, I can know and read a good many books for the first time. This is a wonderful thing for me!

Your company specializes in local internet literature. What would you say is special about that kind of literature?

To be precise, internet literature means that those people who like writing contribute and share their texts online, the categories of which also cover romance, suspense, thriller, history, politics and so on, just like those in print. In China, there are many literature websites mainly focusing on rights trade in internet literature, such as Qidian, Hongxiu, Jinjiang, etc. Mostly, we find authors through those websites and also through the authors’ blog, so sometimes pure chance is a factor. We decide if the works can be published mainly on the basis of the content, writing style, as well as Chinese readers’ reading tastes.

When we get the final manuscripts, our editors will do a great deal of editing work, including regulating the structure, revising the wrong expressions, proofreading and so on, and then send the revised manuscripts to the local publishing house for several more reviews. Finally, the work can be successfully published in mainland China.

Internet literature is becoming more and more popular in China. So plenty of Chinese people now choose to read novels and articles online even before they are published.

So far, An Yiru is the most successful author we have discovered and we have published four titles of hers, three of them on understanding ancient Chinese poetry. To our surprise, these books caused a sensation overnight and more Chinese people became much more interested in ancient Chinese culture.

Do you think there will be a market for internet literature in western countries as there is in Asia?

In China, many ordinary people - not only full-time writers - spend their spare time writing, but they don’t know how to contact a publishing house and even don’t like to, and they prefer to put their works online so that many other people can read them. Thus, the works released online are almost always casually written and most of them are restricted to the Chinese readers’ taste, so I think they are unlikely to be accepted by western readers and published in western countries. Last year, my editor-in-chief Yang Wenxuan took some of our original books with him to the Frankfurt Book Fair 2008 but didn’t get the expected results. However, we are still devoted to finding good writers and publishing their suitable works, and also to trying to introduce them to you foreign friends!

What do you expect to gain from the Invitation Programme?

Thanks to the Invitation Programme, I can attend the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 and I believe it will be an unforgettable experience in my professional life. As for me, I am eager to gain more knowledge about the publishing industry and also about the rights and licence trade in other countries. Besides, we can have a deeper communication with each other.

You have never been to the Frankfurt Book Fair before. What are your expectations in coming to the Fair and what are you looking forward to the most?

Firstly, it’s a big honour for me to get the chance to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009. I look forward to learning more about the publishing industry of western countries such as their publishing trends and marketing experiences, and to getting to know more excellent western writers in order to import more foreign books into China.

Tianjin Chinese-World Books Inc. was established in 2005. It is one of the non-governmental publishing houses in China and has nearly 30 employees. Since its establishment it has been focusing on local internet literature. It publishes about 50 titles per year covering fiction, health, mind & body, history, business & management. It is also interested in rights trade.