Marketing
Wolf Totem exhibited strong sales almost immediately after its release, selling 50,000 copies in two weeks; pirated editions began to appear just five days after the book first appeared on shelves. As of March 2006, it had sold over four million copies in China, and had also been broadcast in audiobook format in twelve parts during prime time on China Radio International. Jiang also released a children's edition of the book in July 2005, cut down from the 650 pages (540,000 characters) of the original (including a 60-page, 50,000 character "call to action" at the end) to roughly one-third the length.
Despite the author's refusal to participate in any marketing activities, deals for adaptations of the novel into other media and translations into other languages have set various financial records. Overseas, Penguin Books paid US$100,000 for the worldwide English rights, setting a record for the highest amount ever paid for the translation rights to a Chinese book; an unspecified Tokyo publisher paid US$300,000 for the rights to publish a manga adaptation, and Bertelsmann bought the German-language rights for €20,000. The author himself is looking forward to the translations; in his own words, he believes that "in the West they may understand more fully" than in China.
A number of other writers took advantage of the author's anonymity to write fake sequels to Wolf Totem, including two books both entitled Wolf Totem 2, as well as the 250,000-character long Great Wolf of the Plains all with the imprint of the Changjiang Arts Publishing House. As a result, in April 2007, he issued a statement which denounced all such "sequels" as fraudulent; he indicated that he was doing research for another book, but would not be publishing anything new in the short term.
Read more about this topic: Wolf Totem