But as the books poured into the market, the publishing industry quickly found what readers thought of as good travel literature--it didn't matter what sort of travel it was about or how it was written. What mattered to a book's success was whether or not readers could relate to it. One forerunner to the Chinese-language travel literature boom was the late writer San Mao, whose works were popular in the 1980s.
但一窩蜂的出版浪潮下，市場很快地就決定了讀者心目中「好的」旅行文學是什麼──不管如何旅行，怎樣文學，讀者對這段旅遊紀行的「認同感」，是這個文類書籍成功與否的基本關鍵。