Some of the popular ones, including Tianxiaguiyuan's The Rise of Phoenixes and Ruyi's Royal Love in the Palace by Liulianzi, are believed to have been sold for several million yuan for TV adaptations.

The adaptation of copyrighted stories is still a field with great potential, considering the fact that merely 6.5 percent of the online-literature industry's revenue comes from such operations. However, doubts continue online about several TV adaptations of popular original works because, despite star casts and the investment on shooting, the performance has not been as good as expected this year.

Battle through the Heavens was originally written by Li Hu under the name Tiancantudou, who ranked second on a rich list of Chinese online writers with 105 million yuan in royalties in 2017. The original work had more than 235 million clicks on qidian.com earlier this month. The total investment in this TV adaptation is believed to have reached 600 million yuan, yet it is rated 4.9 out of 10 on douban.com, a major entertainment-review site.

China Literature's Wu says the number of readers and the size of the online literature market will continue to grow in the future, as content quality improves and genres expand.

Meanwhile, new opportunities will come alongside the boom of copyrighted adaptations and Chinese online literature's overseas popularity.

"Joint efforts in every link of the industry chain will be called for in the future," Alibaba Literature's Zhou says.

"We should seek a benign way to cultivate online literature with great intellectual-property value and build a system that can largely improve its marginal value, so that a win-win distribution mechanism can be formed."

Successful copyright operation lies in content conversion in the end, Zhou says.

Contact the writer at fangaiqing@chinadaily.com.cn