Are we at Jnovel Club's limit?
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I hope that JNC hasn't reached its limit. I like the business model. I like Sam. I want this to succeed. However, I don't consider new acquisitions to be the standard to judge that by. The standard should be whether the company is making a profit.
Each new license allows for more opportunities to profit, but there's a significant upfront cost to that. Sam needs to pay the Japanese publishers, translators, editors, etc. There's a risk that acquiring a new series will only bring loss. Even if it is profitable, it may take awhile to receive the revenue. He needs to have enough cash on hand to cover his costs while he's waiting to get paid.
So, I don't mind if there aren't any new licenses for awhile. I want JNC to profit and expand when it's the right time. I trust that Sam will make the right decisions, because he has more invested in this than any of us.
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I don't have any worries. JNC is still less than a year old. Despite that there are 18 titles already, some close to being caught up. That rate is really impressive.
Money is of course the biggest factor for how quickly JNC can expand. Bite off too much too quickly and you spend all your finances on titles that you don't have enough translators to work on. License too few and people will forget you exist entirely.
I don't know how many paying members JNC has. What I do know is that all of their ebooks are on Amazon, and they all show up for me on the "recommended for you" list when I look for series on there. Anime News Network has reviewed the first volume of quite a few series, which always helps to stir interest. And to me the biggest sign of success is that a larger company is printing physical copies of JNC releases and announcing them at places like Anime Expo. That is HUGE.
TL:DR, I have no worries about JNC's pace. Sam is being smart about his licensing pace, and from an outside perspective everything looks positive.
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My original business plan has us releasing somewhere between 30 and 60 volumes in year 1. When arifureta 3 gets started a little later today that will be our 60th volume, and it's only been 9 months since we launched.
So we are growing a bit faster than my original plan.I am extremely cognisant about the trap that happens when licensing too many things too quickly, especially when there is an expectation both of the users and the Japanese companies to continue to license and publish all volumes in every series. So although there are definitely a few more licenses up our sleeves, you will probably need to get used to a slower pace for new announcements for a little while. 13-15 series at once is a good level for us, and I will gradually increase it to 16-20 over the course of the next 6-8 months.
That should increase the ebook publishing pace to 8-9 per month on average.
I'll re-evaluate whether the market could handle much more than that as we go... -
@sam-pinansky Thanks for the reply, sorry if I sounded a little like a brat in my original post but I guess I felt a bit spoiled considering how many licensees you were announcing when you guys were new. Whatever you guys have coming next I'm looking forward to it.
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@sam-pinansky
Thanks you very much for the input. It's very nice that there still more titles to come this year.
And I'm very sorry for everyone, you especially since my comment were coming off very offensive. I didn't think it will get that reaction thought. Well, I have lots of expectation for jnovel so aside from my worry above, which turn out to be not that serious, I have already braced myself for your decision ever since boarding this train anyways. -
@regex And I'd like to thank you, regex, for saving my butt countless times.
Whether it's converting subtitle timecode formats or correcting inconsistent indentation, or fixing straight quotes to smart quotes, I'd have wasted 100s more hours of my life if it weren't for regex.
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@sam-pinansky said in Are we at Jnovel Club's limit?:
My original business plan has us releasing somewhere between 30 and 60 volumes in year 1. When arifureta 3 gets started a little later today that will be our 60th volume, and it's only been 9 months since we launched.
So we are growing a bit faster than my original plan.I am extremely cognisant about the trap that happens when licensing too many things too quickly, especially when there is an expectation both of the users and the Japanese companies to continue to license and publish all volumes in every series. So although there are definitely a few more licenses up our sleeves, you will probably need to get used to a slower pace for new announcements for a little while. 13-15 series at once is a good level for us, and I will gradually increase it to 16-20 over the course of the next 6-8 months.
That should increase the ebook publishing pace to 8-9 per month on average.
I'll re-evaluate whether the market could handle much more than that as we go...While it was the answer that I was expecting (since myself I thought that 60 volumes was a target you tried to achieve in first year), but certainly there is something that made me anxious about j-novel I mean among your currently novels there is only one title which made me register as premium user, and if we count other "popular" novels it maybe three (I think besides realists kingdoms it also arifureta - good knows whats good is in there and grimgar) that i catch from comments, other titles we might consider as average light novels (although there are some that I enjoyed some among them but I know they are at most slightly above average - Big sister, Mixed Bathing, Infinite Dendogram, Smartphone, Rokujama - but only laters volumes), the others I either tried read and dropped them (Little Apocalypse, For my daughter, Demon King, Arifureta). The others are novels that I never feel like even trying to read.
But my main Point is that one of most popular novel - Realists Kingdom "slowly" approached amount of volumes released in country of it's origin (Japan if someone has some doubts), so with this I would believe that we would need to wait some time for next volumes, which practically one of the reasons i become premium member stopped existing.
So my question is if there would be any new "popular" to fill lack of updates for Realists Kingdom, also to be truthful I would love to see any novels which has a present aspect of management in there, since it was that what catch my interest in this novel but I have no problems if there would be any other novel types as long it would properly help to popularize j-novel because i want to have a stable supply of new chapters for realist kingdom (and maybe other novels i buy/read but truthfully it's all because you licensed realists kingdom i become your member, others i could wait few months between released volumes) -
@dullman Well I happen to have some pretty good info that Overlap has Realist scheduled in Japan on a very fast publishing pace.
You won't have to wait very long for new volumes to come out (at least until it catches up to the web novel release). -
@sam-pinansky I had a job for 6 months where I had to learn regex for my interview and subsequently just write regex inquiries all day every day. In hindsight, it's been pretty much the most useful thing I've ever learned and I use it constantly in the 5 years since. Hooray for regex!
@dullman All I can add is my own perspective, which is that I disagree with your assessment of available novels. I subbed due to a completely different set of novels than you, and I think you're projecting too much your own opinion onto what's good or popular and getting worked up in the corner.
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@sam-pinansky said in Are we at Jnovel Club's limit?:
@dullman Well I happen to have some pretty good info that Overlap has Realist scheduled in Japan on a very fast publishing pace.
You won't have to wait very long for new volumes to come out (at least until it catches up to the web novel release).I checked the publish date of those four volumes and it seems that new volumes is released about every four months (one was shorter?) so you are right they are pretty tight on schedule, but certainly it's good for us that they are keeping those kind of schedule so maybe we would not wait few months between released volumes.
Also I wish you to achieve planned success with j-novel since it's something that brings things that I do enjoy.
@myskaros said in Are we at Jnovel Club's limit?:
@sam-pinansky I had a job for 6 months where I had to learn regex for my interview and subsequently just write regex inquiries all day every day. In hindsight, it's been pretty much the most useful thing I've ever learned and I use it constantly in the 5 years since. Hooray for regex!
@dullman All I can add is my own perspective, which is that I disagree with your assessment of available novels. I subbed due to a completely different set of novels than you, and I think you're projecting too much your own opinion onto what's good or popular and getting worked up in the corner.
I basically joined because of realists kingdom, and the other two i said about being popular i get only from comments on this forum, since myself i can't phantom why they are popular, if it would be more comments about other works i would probably change those title but it's not (there were time where faraway paladin was popular but recently i heard some disappointed voices so I didn't add it here).
By saying popular I meant popular not only for me (but those are welcomed) but popular to broad group of people. For me getting Realists Kingdom in readable language is something enough for me (at least for now).
So my assessment of being popular novels here on j-novel was only done through reading comments so pretty subjective thing so everyone can disagree with this. -
Limit? Limits are meant to be broken.
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@sam-pinansky Same. I joined J-Novel club because of Realist light novel and was amazed to find other books like Outbreak Company, Smartphone etc. It was like coming for a pearl and finding a huge treasure. Anyway thank you for all your hard work and hope we get to see more awesome releases in coming future. I just love reading these LNs on my Kindle.
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@hyferzftw Let's not forget that we got eight titles at Anime Expo this year. That's quite a number of titles to translate.
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Damn, this thread from the dead looks pretty funny given how JNC has scaled since then.
It'd be more thresholds where things have to change behind the scenes admin wise rather than limits
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Remember though that some of those 8 are not ongoing/Active series at the moment.
how many active series have we got going at the moment?
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@catstorm depends on some people’s definition of the word “ongoing” cause we got series like Clockwork, Amagi, and Second Life which are technically on hiatus.
Overall there are 17 ongoing series (that includes stuff like Paladin, and Mixed Bathing, but not the hiatus series I mentioned above)
Sorry but J-Novel Club does not publicly comment on any potential licensing decision or acquisitions.
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I meant ongoing as a series that is actively being translated right now so I would count amagi as an ongoing jnovel series.
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@catstorm 19, by my count.
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If we are counting series that are still being translated by JNC with volumes available and with volumes that will shorty become available (Gear Drive, Realist Hero) i count 26 ongoing series.
Sorry but J-Novel Club does not publicly comment on any potential licensing decision or acquisitions.
J-Novel Club, Future Volume Release Schedule
Manga FAQ
Premium Content List -
@rahul-balaggan The titles I didn't count are:
- Arifureta Zero
- Clockwork Planet
- Gear Drive
- Realist Hero
- For My Daughter
- Infinite Dendrogram
- Rokujouma
- Mixed Bathing
- Faraway Paladin
- Watafuta
That's out of the 32 titles I count as active, which prove I can't do math, because I should have said 22, not 19.
