Faloo Explained: 飞卢, Fanfiction, Flowers and Monthly Tickets

Faloo (飞卢小说网, usually just 飞卢) joined DaoSearch on 19 September as the fourth platform, after Qidian, Fanqie and JJWXC. About 660,000 Faloo books are listed here, the smallest of the four next to Qidian's 940,000, Fanqie's 1.75 million and JJWXC's 2.3 million. That's after a late-September cleanup hid duplicate copies, records Faloo itself has withdrawn and one-chapter openings abandoned for a year.

If Qidian is the prestige paid site, Fanqie the free feed and JJWXC the home of danmei and romance, Faloo is the one that runs on fanfiction and fast power fantasy. Its numbers are named differently too. So here's what's on a Faloo row and how to use it.

What's on Faloo

Faloo's top level is eleven channels, and some of them are compounds nobody else uses: it files 玄幻 and 奇幻 together, and puts sci-fi, online games and sport in one channel. The biggest ones, by listed books:

Then Light Novel and Campus Life, at about 8,600 and 4,800.

Fanfiction is the thing to know about Faloo. It's nearly one book in four here, a close second to the urban channel, and no other platform comes close to that share. Inside it, Anime Fanfiction alone is about 90,000 books, and Film & TV Fanfiction another 54,000. If you want a Naruto, One Piece or Marvel story written for Chinese readers, this is where most of them are.

Don't be thrown by "Urban Romance". 都市言情 is Faloo's name for the whole urban channel, and most of it isn't romance: its biggest subgenres are Urban Life and Urban Superpowers, not love stories.

The tags tell you the house style

The genre says where a book is set. The tags say what kind of ride it is, and on Faloo they're very consistent:

• Power Fantasy (爽文) is on about 350,000 books, more than half of the catalogue
• Transmigration on about 174,000
• System on about 170,000
• Harem on about 65,000

So the typical Faloo book is a transmigrated lead with a cheat system and a lot of winning. That's not a knock. It's a specific appetite and Faloo serves it better than anyone.

The fandom tags are the other useful layer: Naruto (火影, about 5,300 books), Marvel (漫威, about 2,000), One Piece (海贼, about 1,800) and Anime Crossover (综漫, about 14,000) for books that pull from several series at once. Plenty of fanfiction carries no fandom tag at all, so the tag counts undersell how much there is. A machine translator has no idea 火影 is Naruto, so every Faloo genre, subgenre and tag label here was curated by hand. Book titles are catching up too: they're being retranslated with a glossary that puts "Naruto:", "One Piece:" or "Pokemon:" at the front where the Chinese title names the fandom. How that works.

Audience

Faloo's female side is one channel, Female-Channel Fiction (女生小说), about 28,000 books. The other ten channels are male-leaning. The Audience filter on the Browse page splits the catalogue the same way, so Audience: Female and that genre pick the same books today. Use whichever reads better to you, and combine it with a status or a tag.

Reads, Flowers and Tickets

Every Faloo row shows three numbers.

Reads is 点击, Faloo's read count and the number it leads its own listings with. Monthly reads is the default sort: books on Faloo's monthly boards come first, by this month's reads, and every other book follows by all-time reads, with a line where the board ends. There's an All-time reads sort beside it. Faloo's read counts run big: the most read book here, 玄幻：我！天命大反派 (Xuanhuan: I Am the Villain Chosen by Fate!), is past 88 million. Compare Faloo books with each other, never with a Qidian vote count or a Fanqie read count.

Flowers is 鲜花, a free gift readers give a book they like. It's the closest thing Faloo has to a like, and a better enthusiasm signal than reads, because a reader has to go and do it.

Tickets is 月票, the monthly tickets paying readers spend on one book, the same idea as Qidian's monthly votes. They're rare. In a sample of listed Faloo books in late September, only about one in 150 had any monthly tickets. A book with tickets at all has paying fans.

The catalogue sorts come in both flavours: All-time reads and Monthly reads, All-time flowers and Monthly flowers, plus Monthly tickets, Reward and Rating. The figures on each row follow the sort you picked, so the all-time sorts show all-time totals and the monthly ones show this month's, then all-time totals past the line. Book pages show both side by side: chapters, then reads and flowers for all time and for this month, then the score.

Rewards (打赏) are tips paid straight to the author, so money rather than attention, and you can sort the catalogue by them too.

Most of it is ongoing

About 89% of listed Faloo books are marked ongoing, and only about 72,000 are marked completed. As on every platform, "ongoing" just means the author never marked it done, and on Faloo most of those stopped long ago: in a late-September sample, only about 3% of ongoing Faloo books had been updated in the last three months. So the status filter does more work here than anywhere else. Completed Faloo books by reads is a much better starting list than the unfiltered catalogue, and if you want something still being written, add the Updated filter.

The rankings

Faloo publishes seventeen boards, the most of any platform here, and most come in an All view plus a slice for each genre channel. The ones worth knowing:

• Monthly Reads (月点击榜), plus weekly and all-time versions. The default.
• Monthly Tickets (月票榜): what paying readers are backing this month.
• New Book PK (新书PK榜): new serials ranked against each other, so a strong debut shows up before it could reach the main boards.
• 24h Bestsellers (24小时热销榜): what sold in the last day. Site-wide only.
• Most Urged (催更榜): readers spending a vote to ask for the next chapter. Also site-wide only.
• Flowers, Collects and Rewards boards, each weekly, monthly and all-time.

Try a genre slice rather than All. Fanfiction by monthly reads is a much more readable list than the whole site mixed together. When we checked in late September, the top two books on the All board were both fanfiction of 人民的名义 (In the Name of the People), the 2017 anti-corruption TV drama.

Book pages and booklists

Faloo sends its own similar-books list with each book, so Faloo book pages carry a Readers also read rail, next to More by this author, the booklists the book appears in, and anonymized reader comments.

The booklists come from Faloo's 书单广场, its booklist square. About 7,900 are listed here. They're far fewer than on the other platforms and much shorter, ten books at most and five in the typical one, so treat them as quick picks rather than deep reading lists. Why booklists are worth your time anyway.

Where to start

1. Open the Monthly Reads board and switch to the genre you like.
2. Or browse Fanfiction, filter to Completed, and add a fandom tag.
3. Want to exclude harem, or anything else? The Tags filter takes excludes too, and the search guide covers the rest.