Webfiction Statistics: Munpia

This is part of a series of posts sharing some of the research material I collected while researching my book How to Write Light Novels and Webnovels. There was a lot I found that I couldn’t fit into the book, so I thought I’d share it here.The categories listed are translations of the ones the sites use, not my own categories.

Munpia.com is another major South Korean webfiction site, and like Naver is a curated site where only the top stories are promoted and accepted writers get paid for their work by readers. Unlike Naver, however, Munpia is targeted at a male audience instead of a female one.

Munpia has a lot of smaller categories, which you can see at the bottom of the post, but this chart showing the top ten categories makes things pretty clear what’s popular.

Munpia is the only site where Romance is just 3% of the stories I came across, and there’s no doubt what its readers like! It also has the interesting category of Modern Fantasy, which is basically modern characters who can use magic like Harry Potter or Harry Dresden. Fusion is mixed genre work, but still based around mostly fantasy and sci-fi.

The other interesting stats on there are Martial Arts, which are mostly period dramas and fantasy stories about characters fighting and similar to the Chinese Wuxia genre (Koreans call it “murim”). And, the Game genre, since the Koreans literally invented the litRPG genre of people entering VR video games to have adventures.

While doing research, I also came across a document that looked at the genres of stories that had been in Munpia’s Top 100 over the past decade (before 2017). So, I turned them into a graph as well!

Very similar, but you can see that in terms of popularity, Modern Fantasy and Martial Arts Fantasy are more popular than there are stories about those genres.

Here is the raw stats for stories that hit the top 100…