Chapter 201: "Max Out the Attendance Bonus!"
Just as he was thinking, a knock came from outside the office.
Pei Qian looked up—it was Ma Yiqun.
Ever since preparations began for Terminal Chinese Web (Zhongdian), Ma Yiqun had been busy nonstop.
Although staff for administration, finance, and legal had already been arranged and the company's basic framework was set up, the actual operations of the site still had to be figured out by Ma Yiqun himself.
Following Pei Qian's instructions, Ma Yiqun went to a station and bought a ready-made website template along with an author backend, and registered the domain www.zhongdian.com, spending a little over 300,000 yuan.
Since this world didn't have "Qidian (Starting Point)," nobody had hoarded the "Zhongdian (Ending Point)" domain for a sky-high price. And since it was still 2010, domains weren't that expensive anyway. In fact, this was considered a bargain.
On top of that, they hired technical staff for maintenance, bought cloud servers, applied for the necessary government approvals—
After tossing money around for a while, burning several hundred thousand, the groundwork was finally ready.
After that, Ma Yiqun got even busier.
First, he gathered all of his subordinates and began assigning them tasks.
These were people recommended by Zhang Wei—senior classmates, all humanities graduates. Their writing ability was decent enough.
Ma Yiqun's first impression of them was that they were all introverted, with a bit of bookish nerdiness.
Which was normal, after all—they were unemployed.
If they had been smooth talkers or socially adept, they wouldn't have been jobless since graduation, still waiting until now.
Fortunately, their work attitude was fine, and Ma Yiqun wasn't too picky.
He understood very clearly that in online literature, educational background didn't matter, grades didn't matter. Once you entered the field, everyone had to start from scratch.
That was both a good thing and a bad thing.
At the very least, in Ma Yiqun's eyes, their basic foundation was solid enough.
Then, Ma Yiqun laid out their initial tasks.
The website was up, so the first priority was to fill the library with novels.
An online fiction site is, at its core, a content site. Without content, nothing else matters. Which meant they had to spend money upfront to recruit a batch of authors.
If this were a well-funded platform, the standard move would be to throw money at popular established authors—signing them in batches. That would instantly attract readers' attention, though it could cost millions.
But Pei Qian had no intention of going down that road.
Sure, that approach burned money fast and still carried the risk of failure—but successful authors were still successful. Signing them could quickly bring the site a wave of traffic.
When it came to spending money, there were two options:
Spend big to bring in famous authors or throw out small incentives to attract nobodies.
After weighing it carefully, Pei Qian concluded that the second path was much safer for losing money.
Because most of the successful big-name authors truly had skill. On the other hand, the chance of a "flop" writer ever becoming a breakout star was extremely small.
Any author with ambition—even if they were currently struggling—would go to Infinite Chinese Web, the giant platform, chasing the dream of "one popular work to achieve financial freedom."
They wouldn't be swayed by a few hundred yuan in "attendance bonuses" to join some uncertain little website.
So after careful consideration, Pei Qian decided: don't sign any big names—only use attendance bonuses to lure in the struggling nobodies. That was the most reliable way to guarantee failure.
As for Ma Yiqun's early responsibilities, they mainly revolved around training staff and screening manuscripts.
Since most of his team knew little to nothing about online fiction—even those who had read some hadn't studied it in depth—Ma Yiqun had to teach them everything hands-on.
Even the most basic concepts—like "爽点" (payoff points), pacing, and picking popular genres—had to be explained one by one.
After enough training, these people could finally be considered qualified editors, able to help Ma Yiqun pick manuscripts and guide authors with their writing.
Now, Ma Yiqun felt it was time to report the current progress to President Pei.
"President Pei, the situation right now is like this—"
After briefly summarizing the achievements so far, Ma Yiqun shifted his tone:
"But at the moment, we're facing two main problems."
"First problem: Our editors' standards aren't high enough. Their understanding of online literature isn't in place."
"They always prefer to pick manuscripts based on the author's prose quality. But the works they pick this way mostly don't qualify as proper webnovels."
"This is difficult to change in the short term. I'll just have to slowly train them."
"Second problem: The manuscripts we've received are, on the whole, of very low quality. Forget about masterpieces—many of them wouldn't even qualify for a 'Trial Read' recommendation on Infinite Chinese Web, let alone actually make it onto shelves."
"The few relatively decent works—if they were posted on Infinite Chinese Web—might at best get about 500 average subscriptions."
"Of course, I don't mean to look down on 500 subscriptions. I'm just objectively stating the situation…"
By this point, Ma Yiqun himself was feeling guilty.
After all, he had written online fiction himself. As an author whose first-book subscriptions were only 30, he really had no right to despise someone with 500.
But realistically, if the best writer on a platform only managed 500 average subs, then the website was basically doomed.
Because the only reason those writers could get 500 subs on Infinite Chinese Web was the massive readership base there. On the Terminal Chinese Web, the numbers would shrink to a fraction—maybe a tenth.
In short, what Ma Yiqun was saying boiled down to:
The authors were bad.
The editors screening them were also bad.
The manuscripts they had collected so far were basically unreadable.
Since the site hadn't officially launched yet, Ma Yiqun had mainly been recruiting struggling authors from various forums. Once they had enough manuscripts to at least fill out the site, then they would go live.
After listening, Pei Qian's expression remained calm—like everything was under control.
"Do you have the manuscripts? Let me see them."
Ma Yiqun handed him a USB stick.
Inside were the submissions they had gathered—some signed, most unsigned.
Pei Qian casually clicked through a few.
His immediate reaction: an assault on the eyes.
Most manuscripts couldn't be read past a single chapter.
Forget about pacing or payoff points—many of them had basic problems with word choice, typos, punctuation misuse, run-on sentences, broken logic in the first three chapters, unclear themes—
In short, the problems were endless.
From what Pei Qian saw, even the manuscripts Ma Yiqun had selected as "signable" were just "the tallest midget in the crowd." On any other platform, they were still doomed to flop.
That said, Ma Yiqun did at least understand the fundamentals of online fiction. Despite his miserable 30-first-subscriptions history, his free public chapters hadn't been bad, and he had managed to gather some readers back then.
Watching Pei Qian's composed demeanor as he browsed through these atrocious manuscripts, Ma Yiqun couldn't help but sigh inwardly.
President Pei's patience is incredible—he can actually bear to read these…
After skimming a few more, Pei Qian felt completely reassured.
If all the manuscripts in the future were at this level, then this site would only succeed if ghosts existed!
Perfect. Keep it that way!
Pei Qian calmly pulled out the USB stick and handed it back to Ma Yiqun.
"No big deal."
"As for the two problems you mentioned…"
"Our editors' standards being low isn't an issue. Just loosen the reviewing requirements. Right now, our priority is still to fill up the library. Since most writers are only here to sign a contract and get the full-attendance bonus, there's no need to be so strict."
Ma Yiqun looked hesitant.
"But… President Pei, the full-attendance bonus you set at the beginning was 1,000 yuan."
"On the Infinite Chinese Web, the bonus is 500 yuan. Some small sites do give 1,000 yuan, but only if the author updates 10,000 words a day."
"But on our site, we give 1,000 yuan for just 3,000 words a day."
"If we loosen the requirements further, the full-attendance payouts alone will burn through a ton of money every month."
Pei Qian shook his head.
"It's fine. Even if we support 500 authors, that's only 500,000 yuan per month. That's nothing."
"We're a new site. If our full-attendance standard isn't higher than others, why would anyone bother writing here?"
"Besides, for many newbies, writing 3,000 words a day consistently isn't actually that easy."
"Relax. As long as we collect enough manuscripts, a few great authors are bound to emerge."
Ma Yiqun thought about it. What Pei Qian said… did seem to make sense.
But wasn't the probability just way too low?
After a pause, Ma Yiqun added, "President Pei, there's another issue. Right now, most of our staff are underworked."
"Because we don't get that many submissions, the workload for reviewing isn't heavy. Even when our editors occasionally give writing guidance to authors, they often still end up with nothing to do."
Pei Qian waved his hand dismissively.
"That's even less of a problem."
"If they've got nothing to do, let them develop some hobbies on the side."
"Take you, for example. When you're free, you can write some novels yourself—just for fun. Isn't that great?"
Pei Qian stood up and patted Ma Yiqun on the shoulder.
"Yiqun, don't give yourself so much pressure."
"Tengda's philosophy has always been to work happily. When there's work, be busy. When there isn't, develop your interests. If one day the workload gets too heavy, we'll just hire more people. No big deal."
"Don't try to achieve everything overnight. Take it slow."
Ma Yiqun nodded.
"Yes, President Pei, I understand!"
Originally, he had been feeling anxious—thinking that President Pei had entrusted him with such an important task, yet progress was slow and money kept burning away, and he was losing confidence.
But now, seeing President Pei's expression of complete control, Ma Yiqun suddenly felt at ease.
Indeed, following a good leader truly gave one peace of mind!
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