Fanqie Novel now requires new authors to finish a full book before signing
On Oct 12, ByteDance's free web-novel platform Fanqie Novel announced a signing overhaul: Level 0 and Level 1 authors may only use "completed-work signing," meaning they must finish a 150,000- or 300,000-character book before they can even apply, with only three application attempts per book and content locked after signing; an eight-tier "Author Level 3.0" system launched alongside it. The platform frames the change as a crackdown on AI-generated, low-quality content, after already limiting how many books one account can create and banning 855 violating accounts in stages. The report says Fanqie has roughly 260 million monthly active users, more than 600,000 signed authors and a rights library of over 1.5 million works, and that its real business is short-drama adaptation of web-novel IP — per 36Kr, Fanqie-system revenue topped RMB 60 billion in 2025 (over 45 billion from Fanqie Novel, over 15 billion from Hongguo short dramas), while subscription-based China Literature saw online reading revenue of RMB 1.84 billion in H1 2026, down 7.3% year on year.
As AI-generated writing floods content platforms, the cost of policing it is being pushed onto the least powerful new authors, while IP adaptation rather than the text itself increasingly defines the free-reading business.