Zongheng Explained: 纵横, Monthly Tickets, Clicks and Recommendations

Zongheng (纵横中文网, "Vertical and Horizontal Chinese Network") joined DaoSearch on 29 September as the sixth platform, the day Qimao arrived. About 110,000 Zongheng books are listed here, similar in size to Qimao and a fraction of Qidian's or JJWXC's. Like every new source it's still filling in, so the number moves.

Zongheng is a paid platform in the Qidian mould: authors signed to the site under contract, and readers who spend money on the books they follow. It splits its readers into a male site and a female site (纵横女生), and the male side is the larger and the better known. Its main categories are fantasy, martial arts and cultivation, urban, history and sci-fi, which will look familiar if you read Qidian.

What makes it distinct here is what it counts, and what it doesn't. So here's how to read a Zongheng row.

The figures

Every Zongheng book shows five numbers: Clicks, Favorites, Fans, Monthly tickets and Recommendations. Chapters and word count sit beside them. There's no star rating and no booklist count, because Zongheng has neither.

Clicks (点击) is Zongheng's read counter. It's a lifetime total that only goes up, and the numbers are very large: Yuan Zun is past 850 million. It tells you how much a book has been read over its life, not how well it's doing today.

Favorites (收藏) is how many readers have added the book to their shelf. It's a deliberate act, so it says more about interest than a click does.

Fans (粉丝) is Zongheng's fan count for the book, and a sort of its own.

Monthly tickets (月票) are the tickets paying readers spend on a single book each month, the same idea as Qidian's monthly votes and Faloo's tickets. They're the headline figure on Zongheng and the one its main board is built on. When we checked on 1 October, the top book on the main board had about 3,400. A book page shows the current total, and the Honours row shows where it stands on the board. Monthly tickets are the catalogue's default sort too. Few books draw any in a month (on 1 October about 670 of 111,000 had one), so the default list shows the books with tickets first and then every other book by clicks, with a line where the ticket books end.

Recommendations (推荐票) are the free votes readers can give a book every day. They cost nothing, so they're a measure of enthusiasm across a wider crowd than the tickets are, and a book can be high on one and low on the other.

The catalogue sorts are Monthly tickets (the default), Clicks, Favorites, Recommendations, Fans, Updated, Added and Words. The figures on each row follow the sort you picked. Compare Zongheng books with each other, not with another platform's numbers.

On the book page, the tag row also tells you whether the book is Signed (Zongheng has taken it on under contract) and when it was First published.

The rankings

Zongheng runs nine boards. Every one comes in a male version and a female version, and each can be narrowed to a category. There's no board that spans both sites, so every ranking link names one.

• Monthly Tickets (月票榜): this month's tickets, and Zongheng's headline board. The default.
• Bestsellers (畅销榜): what readers are paying for right now.
• New Books (新书榜): new serials against each other, so a strong debut shows up before it could reach the big boards.
• Recommendations (推荐榜): by the free recommendation votes.
• Completed (完结榜): finished novels, ranked by how readers are taking to them now.
• Tips (打赏榜): by the tips readers pay an author directly, so money rather than attention.
• Clicks (点击榜), Most Updated (更新榜) and Most Read (阅读榜): reads, what authors are writing the most of right now, and what readers are spending their time in.

The male site slices into five categories: Fantasy (玄幻奇幻), Martial Arts & Cultivation (武侠仙侠), Urban (都市), Historical (历史) and Sci-Fi (科幻). The female site has Modern Romance, Ancient Romance and Fantastical Romance. Try a category rather than the whole site: Fantasy by monthly tickets is a much better list than everything mixed together.

Rows show how far a book has climbed or fallen since the previous day. The Bestsellers, New Books and a few other boards count things that aren't figures a reader can read, like sales or an update clock, so they rank books without printing a number beside them. Boards with their own counter (tickets, recommendations, clicks) show it.

What's hidden

DaoSearch keeps every record Zongheng serves but hides two kinds from the catalogue:

• Untitled drafts. In the part of Zongheng's id range we sampled, about half the records were an author's unpublished workspace. A draft with no title shows up as a generic 书籍 plus a number.
• Short unsigned openers. A book Zongheng hasn't signed, with under 20,000 characters, is an opener rather than a novel.

Neither is permanent. A hidden book is re-read every half hour, and the moment an author gives a draft a title or an opener grows past the bar, it comes back on its own. A signed book is never judged on length. Zongheng's licensed partner catalogue (long novels from other publishers) stays visible too, since those are complete, titled and well over 100,000 characters. The stats page shows how many Zongheng records are held but not listed.

No ratings, no booklists

You won't find a Score on a Zongheng page, and there's no Zongheng booklists tab. That's Zongheng's doing, not a gap in ours: the platform has no rating system and no reader-made lists, so there's nothing to copy. What you get instead is the five figures above, Honours for every board the book is on, reader comments (translated, anonymized), a Readers also read rail of similar books and more by the same author. Reading shelves, saved searches, reports and the RSS feed all work as they do for the other platforms.

Where to start

1. Open the Monthly Tickets board and switch to a category you like, or flip to the female site.
2. Or browse completed Zongheng books by tickets and add a tag filter. Tickets are a monthly figure, so a finished book may have few; sorting by Favorites is the safer pick for older books.
3. Paste a zongheng.com book link into the search box and the book comes up directly. The search guide covers that, and the Updated filter is the way to tell a live serial from an abandoned one.