Why Fanqie Novels Keep Changing Their Titles, and How to Keep Track

Heads up if you read on Fanqie: titles move. You find a book, note the name, come back a week later, search for it, and get nothing. Or the book page is still there but the Chinese title is different and the English has turned into something else entirely.

That isn't a glitch on our end, and it isn't one thing either. There are a few separate reasons a Fanqie book can turn up under more than one name. Once you know them, it's easy to never lose a book again.

Authors rename their books

The simplest reason. Fanqie authors change their titles, and they do it a lot.

It makes sense once you think about how Fanqie works. It's a free app driven by a recommendation feed. In that feed a book is a cover and a title, and that's the whole pitch. There's no paywall moment where a reader commits, just a thumb deciding whether to tap. So the title is basically an ad, and authors tweak it the way a YouTuber tweaks a thumbnail: try a hook, see if more people tap, try another.

That's also why Fanqie titles look the way they do. Long, loud, spoiler-heavy, full of 开局 ("starting out with...") and 我在 ("me, in..."), often with a colon and a second hook bolted on the end.

Fanqie shows different names in different places

This one surprised us. Even when the author hasn't touched the title, Fanqie doesn't always show the same name everywhere.

Listings test other titles. Fanqie's category listings sometimes show a book under a different name from the one on its own page. When we compared the two, anywhere from a few percent to more than one in ten books on a listing page had a different title, with the same author and the same synopsis. It looks a lot like A/B testing: two readers can see the same book under two names on the same day.

Booklists remember old names. A Fanqie booklist keeps each book under the name it had when the list was put together, so an older list can show a title the book dropped months ago. When we checked a batch of books where a booklist and the book's own page disagreed, the booklist had the out-of-date name every single time.

Fan-fiction titles get masked. Some listings hide titles based on other franchises (Marvel, Ultraman, Honkai: Star Rail and so on) behind asterisks, keeping only the first character or two. A book like 星铁：人生选择，开局流刃若火！ can show up as 星铁 followed by a row of stars, while its own page carries the full name. At one point in August, around one Fanqie book in eleven was coming through masked in listings. (That book's English title still reads "Star Iron..." at the time of writing, because Google Translate had no idea 星铁 is Honkai: Star Rail. Titles are being retranslated with a glossary that knows, and this one will switch over when the retranslation reaches it. More on that.)

Same name, different entry. Fanqie also lists audiobook editions and short-drama adaptations as entries of their own, often under exactly the same title as the novel. We leave out the ones we can identify, but if you ever see two books with one name, the author and the word count tell you which is the novel.

Which title DaoSearch shows

We show the title from the book's own page on Fanqie. That's the name the author has set right now.

Names from anywhere else, like a listing or a booklist, only fill a gap. If a listing name is all we have for a book, we use it until the book's real page comes in, but it never overwrites the book page's title. Masked names are never shown at all: a book whose only known title is a row of asterisks stays out of the catalogue until we have the real one. That's the "masked entries" line on the stats page.

When an author renames a book, the new name shows up here the next time we refresh that book, usually within a few days. The English title is a machine translation of the Chinese, so it's redone whenever the Chinese changes, and a just-renamed book goes to the front of the queue for the new translation. That's why the English can change completely even when the author only swapped a couple of characters: a small edit in Chinese can reshuffle the whole translated sentence. The fandom name at the front of a fanfic title is the exception. The glossary pins those, so a Naruto fanfic keeps "Naruto:" through a rename as long as its Chinese title still opens with 火影.

The one thing that never changes: the book id

Every Fanqie book has a long number, 19 digits, that stays the same whatever the book is called. It's in the Fanqie link (fanqienovel.com/page/7143038691944959011) and it's in ours: daosearch.io/fanqie/book/7143038691944959011 is 十日终焉, The End of Ten Days.

Our book URLs also carry the title after the number, like /the-end-of-ten-days. That part is decoration. If the book gets renamed, an old link with the old words in it still works and forwards to the new one, because the number is what we actually look up.

How to keep track of a Fanqie book

Bookmark the page, not the name. Save the DaoSearch book page or the Fanqie link. Both are tied to the id, so they survive any number of renames.

Paste the Fanqie link into search. Put a Fanqie URL in the search box at the top of any page and the book shows up as the suggestion right under it, even if the search menu is set to Qidian or JJWXC at the time. Both fanqienovel.com/page/<id> links and the /book/<id> links the app's share button makes will work. It's an exact lookup by id, so the name doesn't matter at all.

Search by author instead. Title search matches the book's current Chinese and English titles, so an old name won't find it. Authors don't swap pen names the way they swap titles. Type the author into the Author box in the Fanqie catalogue filters, in English or Chinese, and look for the book in their list. 三九音域's books, for example. Pen names are now translated once per author, so the English form stays put too: 三九音域 is Three Nine Sound Domain on every one of their books.

Use the Chinese, not the English. If you remember part of the Chinese title, try a distinctive two or three character chunk of it. The English is a translation of whatever the title is now, so after a rename it can be completely different even where the Chinese barely moved.

If a list on Fanqie shows a name you can't find, it may be an old one. Open the book from the list and grab its link instead. Booklists on DaoSearch link every book to its page here, which always carries the current title.

It's not only Fanqie

Qidian and JJWXC books can be renamed too, just not with Fanqie's enthusiasm, and everything above works the same there. The id in the link never changes, and pasting a qidian.com or jjwxc.net book link into search goes straight to the book.

For more on the platform itself, see Fanqie novels explained and what Fanqie's read counts mean.