Building an Audience

While fan communities and their complexities have already been abstractly explored in scholarly literature, Asian web novel translation groups present an interesting space for analysis as a niche imported cultural product that was made widely accessible to English speakers by multilingual fans as part of a gift economy, rather than through market expansion by the novels’ intellectual property owners. Exploring the history of online web novel translation websites like Chrysanthemum Garden, Wuxiaworld, and WebNovel, this article uses a combination of the author’s first-hand experience as an editor of these translated works, as well as academic parallels in digital culture literature, to explore the transition of fan communities that value transformational work without capital to an emerging market demographic, ripe for labour and consumer exploitation.