Chapter 14 Early-Stage Preparations

Just as he was thinking this, a knock came at the door.

Pei Qian looked up and saw that it was Ma Yiqun.

Ma Yiqun had been busy ever since preparations began for establishing Zhongdian Chinese Website.

Although administrative, finance, and legal personnel had already been arranged and the basic structure of the company had been built, Ma Yiqun still had to decide how to specifically operate the website.

According to Pei Qian's requirements, Ma Yiqun bought a ready-made website template and author backend from a resource site, purchased a domain name, and spent more than 300,000 yuan.

Because this world didn't have a "Qidian" (Starting Point), the person who registered the "Zhongdian" (Ending Point) domain name couldn't raise the price too high. Moreover, it was 2010, so domain names weren't that expensive, which was a small win.

In addition, he found website maintenance personnel, bought cloud servers, applied for authorization from relevant departments...

After a series of efforts costing hundreds of thousands of yuan, the preliminary preparations were more or less completed.

Afterward, Ma Yiqun started to get busy.

First, he gathered all of his employees and assigned tasks to each of them.

These people were all senior brothers and sisters that Guo Wei directly recommended to Pei Qian, and each of them graduated with liberal arts degrees and had decent writing skills.

Ma Yiqun's first impression of them was that they were all relatively introverted and somewhat bookish.

This was normal, since these people hadn't been able to find jobs.

If they were all eloquent, they wouldn't have been unemployed right after graduation and waited until now.

Fortunately, these people's attitudes were acceptable, and Ma Yiqun wasn't too picky.

He knew very well that web novels had nothing to do with being relevant to one's major or professional achievements. Once you entered this industry, everything had to be learned from scratch.

This was both a good thing and a bad thing.

At least in Ma Yiqun's opinion, these people had sufficient basic qualities.

Afterward, Ma Yiqun briefly assigned tasks.

Now that the website was set up, the first thing to do was to enrich the book collection.

A novel website was a content website; without content, everything was useless, so in the early stages, they definitely had to spend money to recruit a batch of authors.

If it were a particularly wealthy website, they would definitely spend money to poach established great gods, even poaching them in batches, which could easily cost several million.

But Pei Qian didn't choose this path.

Although this approach cost more money and had a lower probability of failure, the great gods were, after all, great gods. Bringing them over could instantly bring a lot of attention to the website.

Money should either be spent on poaching great gods or attracting *pujie* (street) authors. Pei Qian thought about it, and the latter definitely had a greater chance of losing money.

After all, most of the great gods who made a name for themselves had real talent, and the probability of a great god being born from *pujie* was actually very low.

Any ambitious author, even if temporarily *pujie*, would definitely choose a large website like Infinite Chinese Website to pursue their dream of becoming a god with a single book.

They wouldn't run to a small, unpredictable website for a few hundred yuan more in full attendance rewards.

Therefore, after comprehensive consideration, Pei Qian decided not to poach great gods in the early stages, but to only use full attendance rewards to attract some *pujie* authors, which was the safest approach.

Ma Yiqun's main task in the early stages was training and screening manuscripts.

These people knew very little about web novels. Even if some of them had read web novels, they hadn't studied them in depth.

Ma Yiqun had to teach them the most basic concepts, such as *shuangdian* (satisfying elements), rhythm, and themes, step by step.

Only after they were taught enough could these people become qualified editors, helping Ma Yiqun select manuscripts, guide authors' writing, and so on.

Now, Ma Yiqun felt that he should report the current progress to President Pei.

"President Pei, the current situation is like this..."

After briefly introducing the current results, Ma Yiqun changed the subject: "Now, we're mainly encountering two problems."

"The first problem is that our editors' level is not high enough, and their understanding of web novels is not in place."

"They always like to select manuscripts based on the author's writing style, and many of the manuscripts they select are unqualified web novels."

"It will probably be difficult to reverse this in the short term; I can only teach them slowly."

"The second problem is that the overall quality of the manuscripts we receive is low. Not to mention high-quality works, many manuscripts probably wouldn't even be eligible for trial recommendations on Infinite Chinese Website, let alone be put on the shelves."

"The very few excellent works, if placed on Infinite Chinese Website, would probably only get an average of 500 subscriptions."

"Of course, I'm not looking down on 500 subscriptions; I'm just objectively stating the fact..."

Ma Yiqun felt guilty as he spoke.

After all, he had also written web novels. As an author with a first subscription of 30, he didn't seem to have any reason to look down on people with an average of 500 subscriptions.

But logically speaking, if the best-writing author on a website only had 500 subscriptions, then this website would basically be considered a complete failure.

After all, this kind of author could get 500 subscriptions on a large website like Infinite Chinese Website because there were more readers. If they came to Zhongdian Chinese Website, it would probably shrink tenfold.

The two points that Ma Yiqun mentioned didn't actually conflict. In short, the authors' levels were not good, and the editors' manuscript review levels were not good either. The manuscripts they received were basically unreadable.

The website hadn't officially launched yet. Ma Yiqun mainly contacted some *pujie* authors on some forums. The website would only officially launch after there were enough manuscripts to support it.

After listening to Ma Yiqun's narration, Pei Qian's expression was calm, as if he had "everything under control."

"Do you have any manuscripts? Let me take a look."

Ma Yiqun took out a USB flash drive and handed it to Pei Qian.

It contained the manuscripts they had received, some of which were signed, but most were not.

Pei Qian randomly opened a few manuscripts to take a look.

After reading them, he only had one feeling: eye-burning!

For the vast majority of manuscripts, he couldn't continue reading after a cursory glance at the first chapter.

Not to mention things like *shuangdian* or rhythm, many people had problems with even the most basic word usage, typos, misuse of punctuation marks, grammatical errors, chaotic logic in the first three chapters, and vague themes...

In short, the problems could be said to be all kinds of weird and strange.

Pei Qian roughly looked at the manuscripts that Ma Yiqun had selected for signing, and they could barely be considered the tallest among the dwarfs. They would still be doomed to be *pujie* on other websites.

It seemed that although Ma Yiqun's first subscription was only 30, he still understood the basic laws of web novels.

This was also within Pei Qian's expectations. After all, Ma Yiqun's first subscription was low, but his public chapters were still well-written and had a group of readers.

Looking at Pei Qian browsing these manuscripts with ease, Ma Yiqun couldn't help but sigh inwardly.

President Pei is really patient; he can actually read them...

After randomly selecting a few manuscripts, Pei Qian felt relieved.

If the manuscripts they received in the future were all of this level, then there would be no way for this website to succeed!

Not bad, keep it up!

He calmly pulled out the USB flash drive and handed it to Ma Yiqun.

"Not a big problem."

"As for the two problems you mentioned..."

"It doesn't matter if our editors' level is not high enough; just relax the standards for manuscript review. Anyway, our current focus is on enriching the book collection. People are just trying to sign a contract to get a full attendance reward; there's no need to be so strict."

Ma Yiqun hesitated: "But... President Pei, the full attendance standard you set at the beginning was 1,000 yuan."

"The full attendance standard on Infinite Chinese Website is 500 yuan. Some small websites do give 1,000 yuan for full attendance, but you have to update 10,000 words every day."

"And our standard is that we give 1,000 yuan for full attendance if you update 3,000 words every day."

"If we relax the standards again, I'm afraid that just the cost of full attendance will be a lot of money wasted every month."

Pei Qian shook his head: "It doesn't matter. Supporting 500 authors is only 500,000 yuan per month; it's not much money."

"We're a new website. If we don't set the full attendance standard a little higher, why would people come here to write?"

"Besides, 3,000 words a day is actually not that easy for many newcomers to achieve."

"Don't worry, as long as we receive more manuscripts, great gods will always emerge."

Ma Yiqun thought about it, and it seemed that what President Pei said made sense.

It was just that the probability of that was too low...

Ma Yiqun thought for a while and then said, "President Pei, there's another problem. That is, most of the employees' work is not saturated."

"Because there are not many authors submitting manuscripts, the task of reviewing manuscripts is not heavy. Even if our editors take the time to guide the authors' writing, there will still be situations where they have nothing to do."

Pei Qian waved his hand: "That's even less of a problem."

"If they have nothing to do, just let them develop some hobbies."

"Just like you, when you have nothing to do, you can write your own books for self-entertainment, isn't that great?"

Pei Qian stood up and patted Ma Yiqun on the shoulder.

"Yiqun, don't put so much pressure on yourself."

"Tengda's motto has always been to work happily. If there's work, be busy; if there's no work, develop some hobbies. If you can't handle the workload, hire people; it's not a big deal."

"Don't think about getting fat with one bite; take it slow."

Ma Yiqun nodded: "Yes, President Pei, I understand!"

Originally, he was a little anxious, feeling that President Pei had entrusted such an important job to him, but there had been no progress, and instead, more and more money was being burned, making him a little impatient.

But now, seeing President Pei's expression that everything was under control, Ma Yiqun inexplicably felt relieved.

Sure enough, following a good leader made one feel at ease!