January 2023 Livestream!
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@Travis-Butler said in January 2023 Livestream!:
Superfans do this too - even more so, I'd argue.
Consider the following example of a villain.
General audience: Does he sound and act cool as a villain?
Critic: Does this character work well as a villain - in the way he steers the plot, the way he affects the main characters, the way he meets critical standards for villains?
Superfan: Does he fit the continuity established by a TV series (that 90% of the general audience hasn't seen)? How does he jibe with the pet theory I came up with after reading a dozen volumes of ancillary stories that the general audience has probably never read either? (I'm not exaggerating on this one; I've seen this exact behavior when discussing with friends of mine.)
Which do you think better represents a general audience's concerns?I acknowledge that superfans do exist (including for single-entry series), however I consider series superfans to have reduced applicability, especially for the current context of these more "casual" series.
@Travis-Butler said in January 2023 Livestream!:
So let's look at Japanese novel translations. The forums here are generally pretty good, but every so often you'll have a superfan pop up complaining because a translation is overly casual and doesn't meet their standard for a properly 'literal' interpretation. Or because Japanese cultural references that no general reader will catch have been changed to English-speaking ones. Puns have been changed to use English references. Etc. All of these are concerns that matter to superfine, not to a general audience - and in many cases work against a general audience, by making a novel less approachable for a casual reader.
Or take series being licensed, to bring this back on topic. We've had pretty hard evidence in this thread that titles aimed at casual readers, which have received lots of complaints from serious fans here, sell much much better than other titles those serious fans prefer.
Ah, thank you for clarifying. There would definitely be superfans for broader genres/subsets (like sci-fi fans who pick apart the accuracy of the science) that would not rely on an existing series. Further, J-Novel as a licensor would also have fans of unlicensed series (or those where the license is dead) who want a particular series brought over, which does fit with your consideration of superfans.
So yes, critics may be relatively closer to a general audience then superfans. However, all three may still be quite different from each-other, due again to these varied tastes and how much of similar material each group would rather consume (a critic is arguably more likely to tire of highly repetitive material, particularly if it doesn't suit their tastes, while general audiences may vary on this and superfans would probably prefer more similar material).
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@Windsagio said in January 2023 Livestream!:
@lilitu93 The trick would be that both are at this point quite fringe.
I'm gonna guess that, the BL market in English speaking regions is the very definition of 'loud, devoted, tiny' that we've spoken of above. Them having overlap with things isn't that significant when you get for sales.
I think it's less that it's fringe than that it's an underserved market. Plus demand for both danmei and web manhua grew in other channels first - danmei from both live action and animated adaptions (donghua), and manhua via their apps (Tapas, Webtoons, Lehzin). (And, of course, scanlations and fan translations, but that's a given.)
I've got no idea how the published manhua is doing, except that they are still doing it and it seems to be expanding, but danmei is doing incredibly well for Seven Seas:
It also partially depends on the publisher, I think. Seven Seas especially seems to be aggressively going for fans of female-demographic works, and I've noticed that they're the publisher I'm currently buying the most number of novels from outside of JNC.
I'm glad to hear that J-Novel Heart is doing pretty well, at least enough to keep it going. I still don't really like the name of it as female-demographic works aren't just romance, and romance isn't just aimed at girls and women, but I like a lot of what's published in it. I'm sure JNC did more market research than I've ever done, though, when they picked the name. I do wonder, though, if their reputation as "generic isekai" sometimes hurts, and those who would like Heart aren't looking at JNC, but I suspect most people into light novels who are big fans do keep on top of what's licensed.
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@admin said in January 2023 Livestream!:
Here's a simple fact: oversummoned is (as a certain reddit mod would say) an "axed" light novel series. When we announced it people derided the choice (and somewhat correctly deduced it was mostly because we wanted the manga, which is also selling some of the best of any manga we do).
There was no need to guess because you mentioned that during the annuncements (either during Oversummoned or Gag Character slide).
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@lilitu93 With the continued caveat of "the industries are slightly different", I'm super cautious of 'underserved market'. It's always a question until some publisher takes the plunge (although the Danmei example may be telling if it goes well), and people have a tendency to generalize from themselves and think what they like must be generally popular.
It's worth watching and seeing though, I'd enjoy being wrong.
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@piisfun said in January 2023 Livestream!:
Japanese publishers typically start with web novels and turn them into light novels, so some statistics should work here:
Over half of all web novels never get enough chapters to even consider publishing.
Of the remaining ones, half are garbage.
Out of that, 30% are smut, pornography or other difficult to license material, none of which the English market will touch.
Most of what is left is probably getting tried out by the various Japanese publishers.lets say 500 webnovels a year are 'in the wild' /year
so what you are saying is that, out of web novels - half (250?) are too short to bother with.
and half of what's left is garbage (I'm guessing just not written well/not worth reading?)
and of those left a dozen or two so are 'smut' or porn or difficult to license material (I'm guessing derivative of copywritten works) - which leaves 50 or 60 that current publishers are looking at --- maybe we can take a look at a few of the ones described above that are long enough, well written enough, but happen to be smut for JNC "after dark"?I read banned books
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@Jon-Mitchell That's the beauty of the JP system though, it's not 500, it's probably many thousands (I should look up the total naru numbers), and the in-site rankings make it easy to look at what might be popular or resonant.
I'm extremely certain that's why certain oddballs (looking at vending machine) got published, they did good numbers on Naru and so the JP publisher knew it was worth taking the plunge.
There's another trick for JNC though, they're also competing with Hachette (which is HUGE) and whichever JP publisher owns Yen (I never remember) along with a number of other small publishers for titles. You have to be really smart on your bidding...
Logic is out, Unreasonableness is in!
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To put the Japanese web novel scene into perspective, I'll leave this quote from Wikipedia, about Shousetsuka ni Narou, the primary web novel site in Japan.
As of December 2022, the site hosts close to 1,000,000 novels, has over 2,300,000 registered users and it receives over 1 billion page views per month. (source)
Out of those ~1,000,000 novels, the number that have been picked up for publication as a light novel can probably be counted in the hundreds, if even that.
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@WaterDweller And most of the series on JNC are amongst those hundreds!
I certainly wouldn't post on Naru with the intent of being picked up though.
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@Windsagio said in January 2023 Livestream!:
@WaterDweller And most of the series on JNC are amongst those hundreds!
I certainly wouldn't post on Naru with the intent of being picked up though.
Which is what pretty much every LN Author Afterword says; they never expected to get a publication offer.
A number have even said they suspected they were being trolled when the offers started showing up. -
@Windsagio said in January 2023 Livestream!:
There's another trick for JNC though, they're also competing with Hachette (which is HUGE) and whichever JP publisher owns Yen (I never remember) along with a number of other small publishers for titles. You have to be really smart on your bidding...
To quote ANN's disclosure statement:
Disclosure: Kadokawa World Entertainment (KWE), a wholly owned subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, is the majority owner of Anime News Network, LLC. Yen Press, BookWalker Global, and J-Novel Club are subsidiaries of KWE.
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@Gamen, although of course I know nothing about Kadokawa's corporate structure and ethos, in general it's perfectly normal for companies with the same owner to compete with each other.
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@Angelus Yes. That was more to answer the "and whichever JP publisher owns Yen" question.... which just so happens to also own JNC.
For me... I'm not too surprised at the low sales numbers in general. Just look at @Josu_ke's infographics for sales figures from Oricon (which doesn't track Bookworm as an LN, lol), LNs don't seem to even be a big market in Japan. Most of the top 20 series sell <20k copies a month. Even #20 on the manga list sold more copies than #1 on the LN list.
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@Jon-Mitchell said in January 2023 Livestream!:
and of those left a dozen or two so are 'smut' or porn or difficult to license material (I'm guessing derivative of copywritten works) - which leaves 50 or 60 that current publishers are looking at --- maybe we can take a look at a few of the ones described above that are long enough, well written enough, but happen to be smut for JNC "after dark"?
Amazon says: no after dark for you!
With regular LNs being blocked (Hanashi just had this happen) R18 has no chance.
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@Windsagio said in January 2023 Livestream!:
@Jon-Mitchell That's the beauty of the JP system though, it's not 500, it's probably many thousands (I should look up the total naru numbers), and the in-site rankings make it easy to look at what might be popular or resonant.
I'm extremely certain that's why certain oddballs (looking at vending machine) got published, they did good numbers on Naru and so the JP publisher knew it was worth taking the plunge.
There's another trick for JNC though, they're also competing with Hachette (which is HUGE) and whichever JP publisher owns Yen (I never remember) along with a number of other small publishers for titles. You have to be really smart on your bidding...
Yen Press (per wikipedia) Yen Press, LLC is an American manga and graphic novel publisher co-owned by Kadokawa Corporation and Hachette Book Group...Kadokawa Corporation (51%), Hachette Book Group (49%)
and JNC is owned by Kadokawa - I don't know how much "competition" Hachette/Yen Press is and how much is a conscious/intentionally division of labor/market (sort of like - how much is Lexus a competitor of Toyota?)
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@HarmlessDave said in January 2023 Livestream!:
@Jon-Mitchell said in January 2023 Livestream!:
and of those left a dozen or two so are 'smut' or porn or difficult to license material (I'm guessing derivative of copywritten works) - which leaves 50 or 60 that current publishers are looking at --- maybe we can take a look at a few of the ones described above that are long enough, well written enough, but happen to be smut for JNC "after dark"?
Amazon says: no after dark for you!
With regular LNs being blocked (Hanashi just had this happen) R18 has no chance.
I think I remember hashing out this tangent before (sorry I brought it up here)
Amazon has a whole array of 'issues' and labelling is one of them (LN is the same as manga is the same as comic books and comic books are for children so adult LNs are not allowed )- they sell plenty of smut and a new brand (maybe a new company) would be needed --and yes amazon is a monopoly that should be broken/has too much power etc. -
@admin said in January 2023 Livestream!:
Classic series like full metal/slayers sell terribly, 100% of the time. Only print editions sell for those. Later volumes of classic series can sell <100 copies each digitally. So our ability to license classic series is tied to our ability to put out print editions (otherwise we're looking at 5-figure losses for longer series.)
"Classic" seems to apply even to series from like, 2015 or 2016.I see "series from like, 2015 or 2016" and "Later volumes", and I think "Long series" instead of "Classic", which makes more sense from my layman's perspective. When it comes to the Algorithm, it shouldn't really matter that the original text is from ten or twenty years ago, or whether it was beloved or not... Only that it's a new release that's yet to sink beneath the next wave. And each successive volume is basically limited to those who bought the previous.
....So that's a no on Yen ever doing the Index sequels I'm guessing. Oh well, I like Railgun more anyway.
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@Gamen My analysis applies to digital sales. Print is another can of worms and I don't have nearly as much data as someone like Yen on that.
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To one of the above comments, are any of the publishers working on getting Amazon to tag LNs as books instead of manga/comics? The weird censorship issues have hit (so far as I can tell) every LN publisher, and it feels like a lot more money could be made by all parties if Amazon would change the policy.
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I would imagine the issue is are any of the LN publishers large enough to bother to get amazon to listen to them? Working with amazon actually requires someone at amazon to care about the issue at all in the first place.
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@jpwong "someone at amazon to care"... I know what that's intended to mean, but clearly, it's getting the right person to care that's the problem. Having one member of proletariat care is no different from having nobody care, because they are easily shutdown for business reasons.
