The Republic's Literary Ghostwriter: The Entire Literary World Is My Secret Identity

Modern web-novel author Shen Yan wakes up as the young master of a down-at-heel newspaper in Tianjin during the Republic of China era.

The bad news: The paper owes three hundred silver dollars, paper prices have soared, the newsboys have quit, the typesetters are ready to walk out, and creditors are already blocking the door.

The worse news: It’s the early Republic of China, a time of warlord rule, foreign concessions, and bitter literary feuds between old and new. Get one sentence wrong in the paper, and it could be shut down at best, or get you shot at worst.

To stay alive, Shen Yan makes a snap decision: start running serials!

While everyone else is still writing poetry gatherings and parallel-prose editorials, he brings the pacing of modern web novels to the newspaper: three thousand words a chapter, conflict in every installment, and every one ending at the most nail-biting moment.

A radically reworked martial arts epic, Ironblood, Lonely City, bursts onto the scene.

Rickshaw pullers pool their money to buy the paper and ask teahouse storytellers to read it aloud. Newsboys shout until they’re hoarse. Old-school literati denounce it as “the utter ruin of civilized letters” by day, then secretly send servants to snatch up copies at night. When a warlord reaches the cliffhanger about the city’s defense, he slams his pistol on the table and demands, “Will they hold out tomorrow or not? If you can’t write it, I’ll shoot you!”

The newspaper survives.

Shen Yan gets it, too: readers in the Republic of China love a good cliffhanger just as much as anyone.

So by day, he’s a profit-hungry popular novelist, making money with martial arts, detective stories, romance, and children’s tales. By night, he dons one secret identity after another to write essays, start polemics, attack old traditions, take on warlords, champion women’s education, promote the vernacular, and spread science.

One secret identity condemns him as vulgar and pandering to the masses.

Another defends him, arguing that popular literature is the gateway to enlightenment.

A third jumps in to say the first two have both ignored the common reader.

The entire literary world is in an uproar!