Knowledge
Your Good Sense of Backing in Good Books Based on the example of online bookstore Aladin
2025.06.02
Why “Book Fund”?
Online bookstore Aladin’s Book Fund program was first launched in 2012. The initial program allowed accounts to back up to 50,000 won to fund publishing projects. Publishers benefited by being able to raise money for pre-publication production costs, customers benefited by being able to earn up to 130% of their support back as bookstore credit if the book they funded became an overall bestseller, and booksellers benefited by being able to build an early audience of avid readers willing to support in upcoming titles. However, this design could not have a direct influence on the success of the book after publication, as it did not directly link the Book Fund to actual purchases of the book.
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Funding backers make supports by making pre-purchases of books and merchandise.
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Backers can purchase books and funding merchandise together and receive additional mileage reimbursement depending on the progress of the target amount.
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Backers can put their name on the first printing, postcards, and the like if they wish, and record their name on the book’s product page.
With the revamp in 2018, Aladin’s Book Fund introduced four titles to the world. The first book, 97 Times of Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter, a compilation of 30 years of journals written by Lee Ok-Nam, a woman born in 1922 in Yangyang, Gangwon Province, who learned to write later in life after farming and raising children, reached 506% of its funding target and received 50 supportive comments on the Book Fund page. The comments from supporters are still up on the book’s product page. Fans who participated in the Book Fund for Devotion, a book about her writing by Patti Smith, the musician who endeared herself to Korean readers with Just Kids, were rewarded with a set of a pin badge and a wappen badge that proves they were early funders.
The good sense of backing in good books
According to statistics released by the Korean Publishers Association in 2024, the 71 publishers that disclosed their sales totaled approximately 4.89 trillion won, a decrease of 0.1% (approximately 5.2 billion won) from the previous year. The difficulties in the publishing market are highlighted by the fact that the overall market size shrank in 2024 despite the increase in sales of Changbi Publishers (67.6% year-on-year increase in sales) and Munhakdongne Publishing (43.6% year-on-year increase in sales), which published books by Nobel Prize-winning author Han Kang.
Book Fund page on Aladin
Book Funds are the perfect outlet for revisiting books that are too good to let pass. To mark the fifth anniversary of the passing of poet Heo Soo-Kyung (1964-2018), author of The House I Go Alone (Moonji Publications), published in 1992, 215 readers supported How Many Things There Were in the Light That Couldn’t Be Done (Moonji Publications), an anthology in which 56 poets hand-picked poems by Heo Soo-Kyung that they would recommend. Printed on the front and back of the book, these readers’ names wrap around the poets’ poems.
The funding pages of How Many Things There Were in Light That Couldn’t Be Done and I Pour, Pour My Heart Into It
Hoping for a sustainable ecosystem
Aladin’s Book Fund, which featured 12 titles in 2018, introduced 279 titles in 2024. All three of Korea’s so-called big online bookstores now have a funding system, with Yes 24 launching a book funding service in July 2021 and online Kyobo Book Centre starting a book funding service in September 2024. Just as bookstores can choose which books to promote in light of “Your Good Sense of Backing Good Books,” publishers can also choose which platforms to use, which has resulted in an increase in the absolute number of funded books, making it difficult for each funding to stand out. The market in 2025 is a different picture from the one in 2018, when 50 supportive comments greeted Lee Ok-Nam’s first book. Some readers of genre fiction are selecting and deciding on titles that don’t need to rely on funding on the basis of “popular titles” published by “big companies” that are guaranteed to sell, and they are not happy to see these titles introduced in the form of crowdfunding.
Our peers, the people who sell books in Korea, have been walking through the narrow tunnel in creative ways. Will we find the answer? What we should trust is the discerning eye of readers. The market will continue to open tomorrow as we keep walking down that same path.
Written by Kim Hyo-Seon (MD of Korean fiction and poetry department at Aladin)
Kim Hyo-Seon (MD of Korean fiction and poetry department at Aladin) #Book Fund#Support#Backing#Reader |
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