January 2023 Livestream!

akashicwiki

@piisfun Ooh, now that's poggers

Wellwisher

@piisfun When I watched VOD of the stream not long ago (it was 3am when it aired, and I like to sleep), it was sitting at 1,1k views, so make it 4 digits.

pcj

I actually saw a few in the stream that sounded interesting to me. Unfortunately I'm forcing myself not to pick them up because I already can't keep up with what I'm already reading from JNC. The bookshelf in my reader is so full of unread JNC parts right now.

Lily Garden

@HarmlessDave I agree, grimdark is not at all fun or relaxing to me; if I want to read about people being horrible to each other I can turn on the news, and if I’m really being a glutton for punishment, reality TV. Give me fluffy romcoms, wacky shenanigans, and/or court intrigue in ancient not-China and I can settle in for a good read.

Also, to add my two cents to the trash LN thread, I have two thoughts:

On axed series— I don’t think it’s appropriate to say just because a series was axed in Japan means it is not worth bringing to an English speaking audience; one of my favorite things I have ever read on JNC is Deathbound Duke’s Daughter which went on indefinite hiatus after the 2nd volume.

On trash LNs—light novels are not “Great Literature” that is why they are called light novels; they are not Shakespeare (except for Tearmoon Empire, which is Shakespeare), but they are not supposed to be. They are intended to be, for lack of a better term, disposal literature and as for as I know most LN authors do not have lofty literary aspirations, they are just trying to write a story that a lot of people will enjoy

Crimson Wise

@Lily-Garden Replace Deathbound with She's the Cutest and I'd say the same as you, almost word by word.

kuali

@Lily-Garden said in January 2023 Livestream!:

On trash LNs—light novels are not “Great Literature” that is why they are called light novels; they are not Shakespeare (except for Tearmoon Empire, which is Shakespeare), but they are not supposed to be. They are intended to be, for lack of a better term, disposal literature and as for as I know most LN authors do not have lofty literary aspirations, they are just try to write a story that a lot of people will enjoy

For that matter, Shakespeare himself was writing his era's equivalent of light entertainment. He was just really, really good at it, so he's the one we still remember centuries later.

Or Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle. Sherlock Holmes is primarily a series of short stories written for a cheap monthly magazine over a century ago. How many people haven't heard of him?

That a series is written to be light and popular to the mass public of today doesn't preclude it also having staying power and cultural relevance. True, most of them won't, but people shouldn't write entire genres off so easily.

Lily Garden

@kuali indeed, and as someone who dabbles occasionally in media studies I believe more can be learn from light entertainment about people and society since light entertainment tends to be more imbedded in the cultural frameworks of society writ large

Also, I would like to clarify what I meant when I said Tearmoon Empire is Shakespeare, I meant both figuratively and literally; Tearmoon has all the makings of a Shakespearean plot:

Comic misunderstandings
young love
plots of intrigue and portent
dramatic irony
members of the nobility doing silly things
creative turns of phrase & wordsmithing to the nth degree

If Shakespeare were writing a light novel today, I believe he would write something like Tearmoon Empire

lilitu93

It’s funny that people are complaining about generic licenses this time when I was really happy to see a bunch of J-Novel Heart licenses as a fan of female-demographic works, even if they’re probably relatively generic ones. Also, more Bookworm is always welcome.

I’m also glad to see Lady Albert’s novel getting licensed as I loved the first volume of the manga, though I was surprised to see the manga is under J-Novel Heart, but the novel isn’t. I’m hoping the LN for Lady Rose gets licensed too, as I also liked that manga.

It’s always disappointing that lots of older more obscure things don’t get licensed - I’ve got my own wish list of those - or quirkier things that are more unique, but if no one else is licensing them, then it’s probably for reasons beyond J-Novel Club’s control. And they have license-rescued some older titles like Slayers, so they are at least not opposed to doing so when they can. I also miss the weird things that JNC used to license like Ao Oni, Last and Future Idol and JK Haru, but I realise that I was probably one of the few buying and reading them, and there just aren’t that many of those kinds of titles to begin with.

admin

@Ran blacksmith sells more than 10 times better than rebuild world

rsog412

@Ran said in January 2023 Livestream!:

@Microdynames said in January 2023 Livestream!:

@Daxar When the bean counters report that Quiet Blacksmith Life has swept the top of the sales rankings whereas Rebuild World is languishing with the loss-making rejects, one can't be surprised when licensing strategies are adjusted accordingly.

No no no. D: Really? But Rebuild World is amazing... x_x This is terrible. I need to leave amazon reviews or something.

I think leaving positive reviews for Rebuild World might help more than negative reviews for Blacksmith. There's so much "boo Isekai bad" out there that I bet most readers don't even bother reading the comments section of Amazon before picking up an Isekai. I know I wouldn't.

But also, I think I kind-of get it. I'm going to be armchair marketing for a bit: JP Light Novels in the west have two main markets: teens and enthusiasts, and the former is a much bigger market than the latter - a lot more teens respond to the social pressures against these things by "growing out of it" as they get older than by becoming enthusiasts. I have a hard time getting my siblings to even give most of my reads a chance because of the stigma against "weeb shit" (and also how a lot of them can't seem to avoid slipping into creepy territory at times - like how Akira has seen almost every girl he knows naked).

I'd guess that most J-Novel Club subscribers (and especially most of us on the forums) are enthusiasts, while most J-Novel Club customers are kids (or their parents, who are presumably just happy to see their kids reading at all and will buy them whatever books they ask for).

Series with complexity/hidden layers like Rebuild World appeal heavily to the enthusiasts, but (most) kids don't care. Series like Blacksmith have horrendous research failure ("that's not how blacksmithing works") which puts off enthusiasts, but again, most kids don't care.

I would also guess (but I don't know the numbers to verify) that stories set in high school probably do a lot better with the enthusiasts than the kids. Enthusiasts recognize the tropes of Japanese high schools, while western kids (who might be in high school currently) probably compare it to what they know and see it as weird, unrealistic, or out of touch.

There's a case that enthusiasts are tastemakers. We write the Amazon reviews, etc. - but I don't think Amazon reviews drive sales to kids. Kids don't read Amazon reviews, and parents buying books for their kids tend to buy either things that they know, or that their kids ask for. Piling guesswork on guesswork (because I have no data aside from my own childhood), I'd say that most sales to kids are initiated by them seeing part of the series in their school's library, reading it, and then buying/asking their parents to buy the rest of the series.

The aforementioned overt weirdness probably makes it harder for Rebuild World in particular to get into school libraries, which could put a damper on its reach. I haven't read the later volumes of Blacksmith, but I don't think there's anything that would stop the first couple volumes from getting in (modern political insanity surrounding school libraries notwithstanding).

myskaros

@rsog412 said in January 2023 Livestream!:

We write the Amazon reviews, etc. - but I don't think Amazon reviews drive sales to kids.

They do drive general metrics, though. How many restaurants do you ignore because they don't have enough Yelp or Google reviews? How many do you give a chance because "it has a lot of reviews and the aggregate score is quite high"? The review in and of itself might not always be read by a potential customer, but the metrics it helps generate probably reach a lot more people than is obvious.

83drew

@admin said in January 2023 Livestream!:

@Ran blacksmith sells more than 10 times better than rebuild world

Where is that number coming from exactly? It’s plausible but I’ve never seen hard data in sales here like that.

admin

@83drew ...our accounting records. Various sales reporting from amazon and other stores.

And I can say something like that because you can just look at the amazon kindle sales ranking and get basically the same answer publicly.

Rebuild world second volume came out in nov, it's currently Amazon ranking 158,432
Blacksmith 4 came out in october, it's currently ranking 23,334

If you do some research you can find that amazon rankings have like a logarithmic correlation to sales, etc etc...

Basically that ranking says blacksmith sells ~12 copies a day and rebuild <1 (that's below the threshold for estimation at that ranking).

Now you can argue that the "enthusiast" doesn't use kindle, and that's definitely true. Our core audience buys on bookwalker and/or JNC premiums. So the lower the amazon sales the higher percentage of all sales come from those stores. In a way, that means there is kind of a floor to our sales usually. But it doesn't outweigh even close a factor of 10 from amazon sales.

pcj

@83drew said in January 2023 Livestream!:

Where is that number coming from exactly? It’s plausible but I’ve never seen hard data in sales here like that.

The person who posted it owns the company. I would assume he knows.

83drew

Fair enough.

It’s always interesting to get a glimpse into the business side of a hobby.

Crimson Wise

I may have missed it but for the new Drecom series, will the standalone volume be released at the same time as the prepub starts? As Blade & Bastard did.

@myskaros said in January 2023 Livestream!:

but I wanted to ask, would people prefer images to be hotlinked directly in the post?

May I suggest a link to a blog post? Otherwise, I'm fine with Imgur or embedded images in a spoiler, so that they don't take all the space (preferring the latter if I had to choose.)

GeorgeMTO

@Crimson-Wise said in January 2023 Livestream!:

I may have missed it but for the new Drecom series, will the standalone volume be released at the same time as the prepub starts? As Blade & Bastard did.

I expect it to be no. These series all have their first volumes already out in Japan. B&B got that early release because they wanted to market a simultaneous release in JP & EN. Uncertain what will happen for other volumes going forward, but I'm expecting a more typical JNC release structure, with maybe the odd new series getting that v1 simultaneous release.

Ran

@rsog412 said in January 2023 Livestream!:

@Ran said in January 2023 Livestream!:

@Microdynames said in January 2023 Livestream!:

@Daxar When the bean counters report that Quiet Blacksmith Life has swept the top of the sales rankings whereas Rebuild World is languishing with the loss-making rejects, one can't be surprised when licensing strategies are adjusted accordingly.

No no no. D: Really? But Rebuild World is amazing... x_x This is terrible. I need to leave amazon reviews or something.

I think leaving positive reviews for Rebuild World might help more than negative reviews for Blacksmith. There's so much "boo Isekai bad" out there that I bet most readers don't even bother reading the comments section of Amazon before picking up an Isekai. I know I wouldn't.

[snip]

Absolutely; I'd like to get Rebuild World more readers -- perhaps sell someone visiting the page on it, and hopefully convince Amazon's recommendation system to suggest it to people who enjoy other sci-fi novels I like; leaving negative reviews for another series wouldn't accomplish any of that.

Your analysis of why makes sense, and there's only so much that can accomplish, but ... wow. Hearing Rebuild World is a loss-maker just hurts, especially with how much I love the layered plots and characters with their own depths, goals and agendas.

(I don't want to knock on Blacksmith too much anyway; I read and enjoy junk food stories too, even if that particular one is... a bit much for me.)

rsog412

@Ran - @Microdynames might have been speculating or speaking in hyperbole when they said Rebuild World was running a loss. AFAIK, the staff hasn't confirmed one way or the other (at least not on the forums), just that it was doing significantly worse than Blacksmith.

Windsagio

@83drew It's not surprising, all remotely tech-related companies are incredibly analytics driven.

It's also not surprising. Rebuild world is one of those titles that has a very specific market, both in tone/style and in genre.

I like cyberpunk but it easily lost me before the end of the first volume. It's overly dense and doesn't actually have significant literary merit to meet that denseness. YMMV, but it feels like what I referenced above, a 'tryhard' work. Someone pushing themselves instead of having fun.

And Light Novels aren't just Genre fiction, they're Niche foreign genre fiction. The market almost certainly isn't people that want "Serious" works, it's people that want silly pap (I love silly pap, for the record). I'm in a different field (video games) but Blacksmith outselling Rebuild isn't at all surprising.

Final thought, one I had to learn the hard way in work, we can't generalize from ourselves. There's a tendency to think our own tastes are absolute and show what everyone likes, but that's almost always incorrect. One of the basic truisms of design is Never design for yourself, but for your market.

Granted, Naru based LNs are a bit of different, but that same decision point falls on the publishers, and plenty of authors who write for themselves never see the light of day. The system there allows easy filtering of what the (JP) Market wants, which makes picking works easy, if you can avoid a bidding war.

Companies like JNC also have that advantage, because they can potentially look at both Naru numbers and JP sales. The trick is that the US market (even amongst us weebs) is pretty different than the JP market, so you might get some misfires, and JNC specifically is competing with some big, and publisher-owned companies.

Edit: If it's not clear, I'm not at all shocked by Rebuild World's (apparent) performance. I can see several reasons why it's potentially alienating. And always remember, companies are made to make money, not to raise the discourse (It's not relevant, but I can go on a 6 hour speech about the ethics and creative implications of monetizing mobile games)