THE recent deaths of two young female Internet novelists generated controversy about the supposedly wretched lives of struggling Internet writers. Yao Minji investigates.

Emily Wu has just graduated from a second-tier university in Zhejiang Province and hasn't attended class in the last semester. While most of her classmates were busy with internships or job hunting, the 22-year-old was busy writing love stories online, hoping to get paid enough to make a living.

She started getting paid in February, averaging 500 yuan (US$78.50) a month. Wu also gets 1,500 yuan in pocket money from her parents.

Now she has a choice to make - to continue writing 5,000 words a day and earning between 500 and 800 yuan a month or to go and find a real job like her classmates.

"I really have to think about it. I'm not so naive as to think I'll be the next rising star of Internet writers making a million yuan a year. But you do read about Internet writers who just spend two hours a day writing and living very comfortably on 10,000 yuan a month," Shanghai native Wu tells Shanghai Daily. "That doesn't seem so remote and the temptation is so difficult to resist."

She gets paid by the word and the number of clicks her novels receive. Readers also pay to read.

Wu is not alone in opting to be an Internet writer.

In April, two female online writers died - 25-year-old Qing Yuan (a pen name) died of lung cancer and 37-year-old Feng Xiaotian (pen name) died in a traffic accident. Their deaths stirred a wide discussion about the living conditions of Internet writers, who are said to lead poor lives and struggle to make a living.

Some people commented that both writers must have died not only from disease and accident but also from lack of sleep over a long period, overwork, stress, lack of regular meals, junk food and so on - occupational hazards of professional Internet writers, a rapidly emerging group.

The latest report from the China Internet Network Information Center said that by December 31, 2011, China had 513 million Internet users, including 203 million who use the Internet for reading.

Various surveys and Internet companies estimate the number of Internet novel-reading sites at between 100 and 200 and the number of registered writers at one or two million.

Hongxiu, a popular love story site that attracts mostly female readers, recently organized a love fiction competition and attracted more than 100,000 submissions totaling more than 10 billion words - five times as many submissions as the same competition last year.

Qidian, another popular site focusing on martial arts and fantasy favored by young males, claimed it has 10 contracted authors whose annual income exceeds one million yuan each, and another 100 contracted writers who each earn more than 100,000 yuan a year.

But the majority of those one to two million Internet writers are those like Wu, struggling with only a few hundred yuan.

"More than half of the signed writers can't even get paid for the first six months, or the first year - until they get their names out there. Among the other half, the majority makes less than 2,000 yuan a month, and only 5 percent can make more than that," a popular novel site editor tells Shanghai Daily in an online interview. She declines to disclose her real name or Internet name.

This editor is in charge of organizing, supervising and directing around 40 contracted writers. She pushes them to turn out their daily minimum workload of 3,000 words, giving them plot suggestions when they are not sure how to continue a story and giving them assignments when they don't know what to write.

Different story types become paper in turns, she says. In the hot stories today, the main characters travel back to ancient times.

Conspiracy stories and female rivalries within royal families are also popular.

But the main subject of the most popular (most-clicked) stories is always the same: A rich and handsome man falls in love with an ordinary girl. It's pure wish-fulfillment.

The language has to be simple since many readers are teenagers or under-educated workers and the story needs to move along quickly, otherwise readers will turn to other love novels.

Only one-third of them are full-time writers while the other two-thirds have other day jobs, says the love-site editor. "Most of them stay online very late, so I usually work till midnight to be in contact with them.

"My main task is to push them to write their daily minimum, but the hardest job is to ask, no, actually to insist that they write as readers demand."

This is the part that turns Internet fantasy writer An Lin off. He hates it when readers' feedback runs counter to his intentions.

"And the saddest thing is that I have to follow them, otherwise it is a direct financial casualty for me," he says.

An Lin recalls that once he followed his own artistic instincts - and lost nearly 100,000 clicks overnight. That represented a loss of 1,800 yuan at the end of the month. His mistake was killing off a popular female character, so that her brother could emerge as a major character and avenge he death. The readers hated it.

Currently, he is working on two novels at once, both fantasies about how a young man learns about his own magical power and a family secret. His monthly income fluctuates between 2,000 to 9,000 yuan, depending on clicks.

"I actually live quite comfortably now, but I started early, almost five years ago, and I can see how it's much harder to make it now," An Lin says. "There are so many more competitors, more demanding readers and more streamlined and commercialized websites."

When he first started he didn't earn anything for the first four months, then he made less than 100 yuan a month for the next five months.

An Internet writer only makes money when he has earned enough "points" or readers on the site to be qualified as a contracted writer, which means payment. A reader usually pays 0.02 to 0.05 yuan to read 1,000 words, which means a writer only makes 2-5 yuan per 1,000 words, with 100 readers.

And that amount is usually split between the writer and the site, the writer getting between 40 and 70 percent.