Opportunity knocks

When he had recorded almost 100 episodes of the novel series he was recording for his friend, Sha learned that a website was looking for someone to make audiobooks and would pay 15 yuan an hour.

He decided to give it a go. "Compared with the drugstore business and my unstable income, the storytelling experience was something I enjoyed, and the payment sounded OK," he said.

He quit the pharmacy and began recording audiobooks at home as Toutuoyuan Storytelling.

"It was like gambling. I wasn't sure whether the new business had potential, and I often asked myself, 'What do you really want to be?'" he said.

Though he was concentrating on his new passion, Sha also spent time looking for other jobs from 2014 to 2016 as payment was slow. For example, the first few chapters of each book were offered to listeners for free, but they had to pay if they wanted to hear more.

Now, though, his fee varies depending on the popularity of the book in question.

He was not optimistic about the future of storytelling until 2017, when a successful voice test with Ximalaya FM, one of China's biggest online audio-sharing platforms, gave him the opportunity to record a popular online fantasy novel.

Before, Sha had recorded books on his own, which meant he had to represent female characters by mimicking women's voices.

This time, though, he was only responsible for the male roles, while the female characters were handled by a woman the platform employed as an audio storyteller.

They spent about a year developing and recording the voice of each character.

"We wanted to make a high-quality audio work that would be accepted by original readers of the novel and also attract other netizens," Sha said.

The hard work paid off. The audiobook received abundant thumbs-ups after it was put online. It quickly received more than 1.53 billion plays and was awarded 9.4 of 10 on the platform's audiobook ranking.

The success quickly brought Sha a huge number of fans, which made him well-known among authors of online literature and also helped raise his income. While he preferred not to disclose his earnings, he conceded that the sum is much higher than the 3,000 yuan he made at the drugstore every month.

As audiobooks became more popular, Sha saw more people rushing into the sector, both recording books and listening to stories.

"The phenomenon and the increasingly higher demand for audiobooks allowed me to see the market prospects and helped me realize that being a storyteller or an audiostreaming host could be developed as a career," he said.