Suggestion: sell "series bonus content" as a separate title
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I own all of several J-Novel series as Kindle editions from Amazon. I'd like to read the bonus content, but not enough to buy all of them twice.
How about offering a "book" of say, "How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom - BONUS CONTENT ONLY" that includes only the Premium Edition bonus content, for all volumes? And as new volumes are released, it would be updated with their bonus content?
I'd pay $5-10 for that. J-Novel gets paid, the author and their publisher gets paid, and I get to read the extra content.
Sales probably wouldn't be huge, but it would also be a nice thank-you to those of us supporting the company and authors with our Amazon purchases.
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This was brought up before but never really went anywhere.
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IIRC, for some of the series, the publisher wants the bonus content to be hard to get, considered a sort of "exclusive" thing, because that's how it is in Japan.
You say you don't want to buy all of them twice? Let me tell ya, that's what they do in Japan.For some Light Novels, there'll be 3-4 bonus short stories, that you can only get if you buy it in participating stores, and each store might have a different bonus story, so you have to go to 3 different stores and buy the same volume 3 different times.
The bonus stories are pretty much exclusively for the really dedicated fans.
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@tusf damn... That sounds pretty horrible TBH...
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They do this with video games too sometimes. Separate exclusive DLC if you buy from different shops.
Some Kickstarters have exclusive DLC tiers too.
I would do the same thing I do now; treat those bonus stories as if they never happened and just get my one volume. Of course, sometimes they are referenced back to in the main story, which can be confusing.
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@sinnoaria Don't think I've ever done that. Like, I have a British sci-fi author I love and I try to get signed copies of all his books, but I dont get multiple copies of the books. That seems like a waste.
@Terrence Yeah, i remember the retailer exclusive DLC. Dumbest idea ever. I'd never buy a $60 game more than once. Dont think I've seen that in a while though since they're really trying to push digital nowadays, so I doubt they want people going back to gamestop for some DLC. And for kickstarter tiers, you usually pay for the actual specific extra stuff, which makes sense. I do that for some of the kickstarters I back.
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@terrence said in Suggestion: sell "series bonus content" as a separate title:
sometimes they are referenced back to in the main story, which can be confusing.
well, I think it all depends. In smartphone, there is a bonus story in like vol 1 where the girls have a talk with each other and in like vol 3 it is referenced that they had a talk and it would not have mattered if we saw the talk or not. Also, Faraway Paladin has a bonus story about Gus, Blood and Mary when they were alive in like vol 1, but this can be referenced in future books and not be that important whether you read it or not. One more thing is these bonus stories usually are stuff that can happen off-screen and we will not lose anything from it.
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So far, the only series with bonus short stories I would definitely get is Infinite Dendrogram, Isekai Mahou, and Realist Hero.
Infinite Dendrogram's short stories are full of information.
Realist Hero's short stories is essentially an extension of events from the volume.
Isekai Mahou has short stories referencing events from throughout the series, including Suimei's Earth-Side harem that hasn't been revealed yet in the LNs.
Most other short stories are just side story stuff.
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I think this idea might cause less sales in the future. For example I am up-to-date on all LNs I'm currently reading. If a volume with only premium content for all volumes is released I could buy only that one instead of buying each individual volumes.
Let's take Realist Hero as example:
- I could buy the premium content volume (even for $10) but I could skip buying the other 7 volumes (7*6$ = 42$).
- Now let's remove the premium content value: $42 - $10 = 32$ lost in ebook sales.
- If the user is a normal member that would increase the lost revenue by $7 more USD since premium credits cost 1$ more. That makes it 39$ lost.
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@terabyte The assumption by the poster is that you have already purchased the volumes through one of the "normal" ebook outlets, though. JNC received revenue for those volumes already, and the "bonus content" does not really have a lot of value if you haven't purchased/read the rest of the books.
As such, this suggestion would be a net increase in revenue for JNC.
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Depends on the terms of which they got the licenses for these short stories.
If the terms say its not to be sold outside the premium version, they'd have to renegotiate the terms.
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@someoldguy I get that, but I'm just pointing out another way it could be used too :)
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@someoldguy said in Suggestion: sell "series bonus content" as a separate title:
@terabyte The assumption by the poster is that you have already purchased the volumes through one of the "normal" ebook outlets, though. JNC received revenue for those volumes already, and the "bonus content" does not really have a lot of value if you haven't purchased/read the rest of the books.
As such, this suggestion would be a net increase in revenue for JNC.
Yes, I've purchased the ebooks, just from Amazon as kindle books instead of from J-Novel directly.
@village-idiot said in Suggestion: sell "series bonus content" as a separate title:
Depends on the terms of which they got the licenses for these short stories.
If the terms say its not to be sold outside the premium version, they'd have to renegotiate the terms.
I wondered about that, but I was hoping the Japanese publishers would be more flexible since the stories would only be the English translations which Japanese readers would have no interest in. So unlike an anime DVD with soft subs there's no danger of losing sales to reverse imports.
I'd also be interested in some kind of upgrade / trade-in program where I could show my Amazon order IDs and pay something less than full price to get the premium versions, but my guess is that would take too much manual labor on the JNC side to be practical.
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@harmlessdave
The problem with your suggestion is that the Premium E-Book that JNC offers would become useless since anybody can just grab the Bonus Content as long as they have a copy of the E-Book. Plus, you've said it yourself that your willing to pay $5-10 for the bonus content so I suggest to just buy the Premium E-Book which is $6 or $7 depending on your membership.Let's not forget that the main reason Premium Membership was created was so that people would buy Premium E-Books in bulks. Normal Membership were given the ability to purchase Premium E-Books only after a few months since JNC started. So this means that Premium E-Books is something that is supposed to be bought only in JNC and Bonus Content are what makes them special special compared to the E-Books purchased from outside, and the DRM-Free as well.
My main points are as follows:
BONUS CONTENT ONLY bundles = Premium E-Books becoming less special and valuable = Premium Membership losing value since Premium E-Books which originally contains bonus contents can now be bought separately -
I think the fact we get this bonus content so much easier than it was originally in Japan (we buy one premium ebook rather than several store exclusive versions) means it'd be pushing shit uphill to get this approved. :(
Same as last time this came up, I'd advise to buy everything J-Novel direct from now on so you don't miss out in the future (cancel any outside pre-orders), then decide later if you can justify repurchasing premium versions & how many on a case by case basis. I was lucky & only had 4 volumes to buy a second time (Smartphone V1-4), I know others have repurchased more than that.
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Yeah, I was really lucky. Only had bought Mixed Bathing, which just had illustrations. Eventually re-bought that too 'cause I'm anal about having all my books in one place, but yeah. I always buy JNC books from JNC nowadays.
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@bartzbb said in Suggestion: sell "series bonus content" as a separate title:
@harmlessdave
The problem with your suggestion is that the Premium E-Book that JNC offers would become useless since anybody can just grab the Bonus Content as long as they have a copy of the E-Book. Plus, you've said it yourself that your willing to pay $5-10 for the bonus content so I suggest to just buy the Premium E-Book which is $6 or $7 depending on your membership.Let's not forget that the main reason Premium Membership was created was so that people would buy Premium E-Books in bulks. Normal Membership were given the ability to purchase Premium E-Books only after a few months since JNC started. So this means that Premium E-Books is something that is supposed to be bought only in JNC and Bonus Content are what makes them special special compared to the E-Books purchased from outside, and the DRM-Free as well.
My main points are as follows:
BONUS CONTENT ONLY bundles = Premium E-Books becoming less special and valuable = Premium Membership losing value since Premium E-Books which originally contains bonus contents can now be bought separatelyActually re-buying wouldn't be $10 per series, it would be $36 for Realist, $42 for Daughter, $54 for Smartphone and so on, almost the same amounts that I've already paid to Amazon for the Kindle editions.
Perhaps $10 is too low, but for me $54 is way too high.
I understand that Japanese readers have been trained to be goug--uh, to support publishers even more strongly, but coming into LN from reading science fiction and fantasy from western publishers I'm used to buying a book and getting all of the content that the author created.
Some authors like Sharon Lee and Steve Miller do write additional short stories in their Liaden universe, but they are sold separately as they are written (with some given away free on baen.com) and then later sold in novel-length collections for the price of a normal novel.
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The premium membership works as a little bit of a strange hybrid in my opinion, as it both gives you onsite reading and gives you epubs (you're paying for both). I would say that makes the most sense for people who might want to try out a series on the site to decide if they want to buy an epub.
The premium content (short stories and the like) is somewhat locked behind that system, and it does miss potential customers for that content: people who just want epubs (or buy offsite) without paying for the membership part and people who don't care about epubs.
People who bought offsite before knowing about premium are effectively in the first category with people who don't want to pay the extra for the onsite reading part, even if the motivation is different.
I am in my second category, in that I'd be interested in paying a little extra for the chance to view the premium content, but the base membership fits my reading needs too well since I don't care at all about owning epubs, and buying the entire epub just for the short stories is above my pricepoint.
The current system doesn't really cater to those groups of people, so there's some amount of revenue to be made by doing something like releasing a bonus story collection. But there's potentially a downside of making it cheaper for the people in those groups who are currently willing to shell out to buy a duplicate epub, spend extra for unused membership-reading, or buy an epub just to read the last few pages.
