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.
Naver.com is the South Korean equivalent to Yahoo.com- a giant portal to the internet which offers news, shopping, entertainment, and everything a user could ask for. They also offer webfiction and webtoons, and have begun to bring these to an English market as well.
As far as fiction goes, Naver is much more popular with women than men, as is evidenced by the stories by category listed on their site:
As you can see, Naver doesn’t offer a wide variety of genres, but focus on a few profitable ones they know will be popular with audiences. There is a male-oriented component, which would be the Fantasy, Martial Arts, and Sports categories, but women’s fiction is around 67% of the site, so it’s not even a competition.
In Korea, webfiction has a broader audience, and is read and written by older writers as well as young ones. Naver seems to be a popular site with Korean housewives who want to make a little extra money writing romance in their spare time. Did you know that 51% of webfiction writers in Korea make money from their writing? That provides a pretty good incentive to write!
The numbers for these stats are curated and accepted stories which have been approved by the site, which is why they’re so low.
| Genre | Number | |
| Romance | 22603 | 56% |
| Fantasy | 5619 | 14% |
| Marital Arts | 3271 | 8% |
| Sports | 3213 | 8% |
| Romantic Fantasy | 2968 | 7% |
| Boys Love | 1565 | 4% |
| Mystery | 718 | 2% |
| Light Novels | 524 | 1% |
| 40481 |
