Rebirth 04: Starting from Taking an Unconventional Approach

The strong smell of smoke, like a baby's little hand, repeatedly pounded in my brain.

Han Fei was jolted awake from his sleep by the choking. He covered his nose and fanned himself, wondering to himself: What's going on? Is the house on fire?

When he saw his surroundings clearly, he was completely stunned.

There was an ashtray on the table, stuffed full of cigarette butts, many of which had overflowed and were scattered all over the table.

The layout of the house has a distinct sense of the era: green glass windows, semi-circular storage cabinets, posters of Little Jew on the walls, and an electronic clock that shows the date as March 1, 2004.

Han Fei rubbed his reddened eyes, his heart pounding: He's back? A memory suddenly burst forth from his mind, surging in.

In 2004, he was the president of Bluebird Publishing House.

Bluebird Magazine was born in the 90s after the ban on private publishing houses was lifted. It initially targeted the literary field and reached its peak in the late 90s, with a monthly circulation of up to 30 copies.

However, after the turn of the millennium, the market changed dramatically, and Qingniao Publishing House could not keep up with the times, with its circulation plummeting year by year.

The old president, who was also his father, retired due to serious illness, and Han Fei took over this mess from his father.

Upon taking office, he implemented reforms and transformations, moving towards the model of "Story Club." Initially, the results were remarkable, with circulation stabilizing at around 10 copies.

However, with the rise of the Internet and the increasing diversity of people's entertainment options, Qingniao Publishing House's offline distribution channels, which were already inferior to those of large publishers, saw its circulation decline again, eventually falling to the survival threshold of 1 copies.

Han Fei looked at the full jar of cigarette butts and thought about how he was currently mired in anxiety, unable to fall asleep without drinking a bottle of liquor every day.

In his past life, he mortgaged his car and house for one last gamble, but as the saying goes, "a gambler gambles until he has nothing left," and he ultimately failed.

After his failure, he struggled through life again, and relying on his experience as a publishing house owner, he switched careers to become an editor in the online novel industry, working at Zongheng.com and Qidian.com, the holy land of online literature.

Later, riding the wave of new media, he earned his first pot of gold, several million yuan.

Later, with the advent of the short drama era, he built a content team by leveraging his industry connections and earned millions in revenue.

It wasn't until he was over 40 that he finally bought back the house in Shanghai that he had sold years ago.

Before his rebirth, he was planning to produce short dramas on his own and start a new business, naming it "Bluebird Film and Television Co., Ltd."

As a result, at the celebration banquet, he drank too much due to excessive excitement, and his vision went black. When he opened his eyes again, he was back here.

Han Fei rubbed his face, filled with emotion: "It's been a long journey." Looking back on his life, the bankruptcy of Qingniao Publishing House was a deep-seated regret, and all his subsequent struggles were merely attempts to make up for it. Now, returning to a crucial juncture in his life, he finally has a chance to salvage the situation.

Over the years, he has reviewed the reasons for Qingniao Publishing House's closure countless times, and concluded that it was due to two main reasons: First, the content failed. The publisher's main product was the magazine "Monthly Storytelling," whose content completely overlapped with "Storytelling." However, due to limitations in brand recognition and payment for articles, the quality of the content was far inferior to the latter.

Secondly, there is a gap in offline channels. Poor content leads to sluggish sales of the magazine, and offline channels are unwilling to purchase it. Even if they agree, they require Qingniao Publishing House to pay high entry fees, creating a vicious cycle of "unable to expand channels → difficulty in improving content quality → even less willingness for channels to purchase".

After pondering for a long time, Han Fei recalled the solution he had figured out more than ten years later: to bring the model of promoting new media novels in later generations to this era and use SP services to promote first-person short stories.

So-called new media novels are those that are disseminated through new media. The peak period was around 2017 and 2018, when WeChat public accounts were at their golden age, and many bloggers took on article writing business, charging fixed slot fees and high revenue sharing.

The content is mostly highly impactful, such as catching adulterers, unexpected fatherhood, and family feuds. The audience is broad, but the fees are not low: a 2000-word chapter of a regular online novel costs only one cent, while a similar length of a new media novel can cost five cents or even one dollar.

SP, or SMS payment interface launched by China Mobile's mobile internet service provider, often appears in the form of fraudulent SMS messages: "Hello, would you like to see pictures of beautiful women? You have already activated XX service. Click to send Y to unsubscribe." Once a user replies, the service is automatically activated, and 5 yuan is deducted from their monthly phone bill.

Of course, there are also legitimate examples, such as stand-alone mobile games charging through SPs, Tencent's offline SMS service (which costs 5 yuan per month to receive offline messages from friends), and NetEase's daily news push.

In 2004, the SP (Service Provider) business was on the rise, reaching its peak in 2006 with an annual business volume of 60 billion yuan. This charging model is highly compatible with later new media novels, and Han Fei could have easily copied this experience.

However, he must first solve three problems: the first is the content, which is relatively simple, as he, as the president of the publishing house, has access to a large number of authors.

The second step is to build a website as a storefront for SP business verification. At the same time, it can be used to upload novels and enable paid features, similar to the short story model of Zhihu in later generations. This requires finding a technical staff member.

Thirdly, there's traffic promotion. In the SP era, honestly doing business was not enough to make a difference. Those who really made big money were those who cooperated with leaders of mobile companies to obtain tens or hundreds of thousands of customer mobile phone numbers and send out promotional text messages in bulk.

All of this requires money.

Han Fei immediately searched through the account information and calculated the existing funds.

After taking stock, the result was as follows: only 38000 yuan remained. In 2004, this amount was not small, but for the president of a publishing house, it was far from enough.

He recalled that even after streamlining the editorial department, there were still 5 editors, and the monthly salary expenditure alone was 6000 yuan, not including the major printing costs.

Han Fei carefully calculated: based on the current monthly circulation of 1 copies, the total monthly expenditure, including printing, rent, employee salaries, royalties, and miscellaneous expenses such as entry fees to distribution channels, is as high as 72000 yuan.

With only 38000 yuan in hand, it meant that if he couldn't find a source of funding, the publishing house would go bankrupt by the end of the month. In his previous life, he had mortgaged his house and car to prolong his life; in this life, he would never repeat the same mistake.

After a moment's thought, Han Fei made a decision: First, regarding the editorial team, try to keep them calm and secure their salaries for a few months.

Secondly, we dealt with the inventory. The more than 2 magazines that were stuck in the warehouse were no longer sold. Instead, they were sold directly to pulp mills for recycling, which brought back several thousand yuan of our principal.

Secondly, he pledged his old Xiali sedan, which is worth 10 yuan. He should be able to get more than 2 yuan in return by pledging it.

Finally, to fully promote the open-source transformation, he first wrote a viral short story and submitted it to the editorial department as a template, so that the editors could accept manuscripts in this style.

Next, they tricked a programmer into building a website, joining the SP alliance and affiliating with the website, and then squeezed out money from their own pockets to buy mobile phone numbers from mobile phone stores in rural towns, pushing the viral short articles to the lower-income groups.

If the model works, the funding problem can be solved quickly; if it fails, the house must be preserved, and it must never be pledged. As a reborn individual, he has plenty of ways to make money and has no worries about having no way out.