The old-fashioned way.

Time magazine takes a look at China’s booming “internet-novel industry” — which, Time posits, is doing well largely “because of the greater freedom from censorship enjoyed online by writers and readers.”

There is one particularly major player in this burgeoning industry, according to Time: “Shanda Literature, which controls over 90% of China’s online-reading market, rakes in an estimated revenue of 100 million yuan ($15 million) per year. Running three popular online-novel websites, Shanda boasts a total readership of 25 million and is growing at 10 million per year, according the company.”

Hou Xiaoqiang, who studied Chinese literature while at university in Beijing and worked as an editor at a major Chinese Web portal, is the founder of Shanda Literature. According to Time, he “describes the company — in which budding writers self-publish their work without having to be vetted by editors — as not only a profitable business, but also an extension of his own literary aspirations. ‘I believe everyone can be a writer,’ he says. ‘Especially now, when the Internet really has become part of our lives.'”

Whether everyone is a writer or not is certainly an open question – one that Melville House slush pile readers would happily engage with, I’m sure. But certainly less stringent scrutiny by the government is credited with spurring the industry on. Time quotes Zhang Kangkang, a renowned novelist and vice chairwoman of the Chinese Writers Association, as saying, “All books are required to go through three rounds of government-supervised editing, which could take months, before they can be published on the mainland. Whereas online novels almost instantly reach the public at the click of a button.”

Meaning, I suppose, that now everyone in China can read the slush pile!