This essay mainly discusses how Feng Menglong earned the reputation in the publishing market in late Ming Dynasty. His marketing events had been holding from late Wanli, Taichang, Tianqi, until Chongzhen period was destroyed (1611 A.D.-1646 A.D.). According to Robert Darnton's concept of ‘communications circuit’, Feng Menglong played multiple roles such as an author, an editor, a publisher, and a book seller, which is the reason why an overall consideration on his writng, editing, publishing and selling works is a must when discussing Feng’s creations.
Feng's identity changed from ‘qingjin, a scholar, to a ‘jinshen’, a scholar-official. While he was running his publication business, since he is not only a scholar-official but also a writer, we could tell that every of his publication was influenced by his multiple identities.
In other words, all of his creating activities and publishing consideration are related to his doubled-identification. To study in his publication business would help to realize the procedure of how a junior scholar gained a positive reputation, improved his personal life, and even benefited his official encounter, among the prosperous publishing industry in late Ming Dynasty.
Although the study about Feng Menglong has been studying for nearly a hundred year, there still have been several one-sided observations of his life, with a modern researching method, due to the lack of procedure to form his life encounter and also corresponding evidences. In the first chapter, Feng’s forty-three credible works are selected and managed in the order of the published time. Then, in the following four chapters, upon different literary classification of these forty-three works, four periods of his publication works will be discussed.
To sum up, there are five features of Feng's marketing strategy. First, he was sensible and sensitive to the trends and adjusted his publishing strategy in time, so that he could release proper works in a proper time and gain both fame as well as profits. Secondly, he used different pseudonyms to manage his different writer images such as a celebrity, a scholar, or a novelist. Third, through the increasing development of his personal relationship, his publication could be recommended by celebrities. Fourth, the editing goal and marketing position strategy is to publish for both scholars and public. Fifth, different from the publishers who deleted partly texture depending on various needs, his historian-rigorous style was unique, which stood out in the market of his time.
This composition aims to broaden the realization of the published industry in late Ming Dynasty, with constructing Feng Menglong’s procedure of gaining positive reputation and social position as well as his marketing strategies in publishing business, despite the current status that is limited by the one-sided information or the modern method from Western culture, which is only based on business publishers, not a double-identified scholars such as Feng, in Chinese society.