• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.22 no.10
• /
• pp.658-675
• /
• 2022

With the advent of the OTT platform, the world has become an era in which the same media content is shared and reacted in real time by being grouped into one culture. This study attempts a producer study of web novel writers, who are producers of the web novel market that is expanding into webtoons, dramas, and movies with IP (intellectual property rights) of the original story at a time when Korean K-content such as "Squid Game" and "Weird Lawyer Woo Young-woo" leads the global market. In this study, web novel writers were viewed as producers of commercial media content, not just 'Novelist', and their identities and characteristics of the labor process were examined. Web novel writers began writing web novels as a side job or two jobs, and cited the fact that they can make profits alone without barriers to entry and without incurring capital or facility costs. Although there is no barrier to entry, most writers experience severe failure in their first work, which is attributed to the misunderstanding that the word "writer" is someone who writes what they want in any genre. Web novels are different, so writers go through the process of realizing that in order to succeed by writing web novels, they must be thoroughly in the audience's shoes and write them according to the trends and codes they want. Web novel writers expressed their identity as "story sellers," "story producers," "people who can produce IP alone," and "people who satisfy fantasies that cannot be achieved in reality," and in common, there was a strong sense of being a person who provides stories and makes profits or sales. Regarding the burden of writing a huge amount of web novels, the writer with a high income expressed a generous position that "the income is higher than the effort," but ordinary writers complained of difficulties in the hard work, saying, "It seems like I am working hard on writing that I have to write constantly.