[Suggestion] Novel Pricing
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A thought comes to mind about pricing. The price to consumers is "Cost of doing business"+"regulatory expenses (aka taxes)"+profit. Cost of doing business includes royalty and licensing expenses, wages for translators and editors, and other business expenses. Depending on the business organization (incorporated or sole proprietorship) the profits may or may not include paying owner of the company.
Regardless of that, an arbitrary increase in price is generally seem as attempting to increase profits, when the truth could be increased costs of doing business. I have no basis for this, but I suspect that licensing a Kadokawa title may cost a bit more than other publishers. That would either entail an across the board price increase (credited cost more) or abandoning the single price model (which costs more to implement). A price increase could also be driven by needing to pay translators and editors more, though that means more towards an across the board price increase.
Truthfully, I don't know which I would rather see.
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Believe it or not. The prices of some of the series here for Premium ePubs are also cheaper than the original Japanese ebook versions as well lol... :p
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I agree, I don't know how they are running this business but I would recommend them running ads to lower costs. To someone who isn't a frequent reader the $4.95 membership doesn't make sense to me as most of the first few volumes from this site isn't accessible which is a turn off for anyone who is new on the site or are unfamiliar with the pricing of Japanese novels.
I did not know until today that Japanese novels were so expensive (around $10). Personally for someone who reads them to kill time and not think about anything like me, this is just weird. I mean Harry Potter which is quite renown costs less than $10 (amazon, paper back) and the content inside is quite significantly larger (in terms of word count/ content). The only explanation I could think of for this phenomenon is that Japanese Novels, especially new ones don't get much attention and usually doesn't sell.
Now I don't criticize the push to license novels in an effort to expand market, but charging something for more than its real value does not sell. If you want to digitalize and promote something, sell them cheap, don't be afraid to lower the market, the market takes and it gives. If the promotion works, you are probably gonna make a lot more than just increasing its cost and what you makes can then be given back to the writers, how ever much that is that they want.
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@mianli I did consider offering an option where people could read for free as long as they allow their browser to mine cryptocurrency for me at the same time, but I did the math and it just doesn't work value-wise.
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@sam-pinansky Not crypto but just pure simple ads. Track trafict through your site and sell it to ads companies, It's really is free money
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Let's say that licensing cost for each volume is 3k USD (it is probably a lot higher) and localization cost is around 3k USD as well. J-NC's books cost 7 USD on Amazon and Amazon takes a third of that I believe. So they would have to sell 6000 / (7x0.67) = 1500 copies to just break even. If you however reduce the price by 50% you would have to sell 3000 copies to break even. But here is the thing. Reducing the price by 50% doesn't double the sales at all.
My calculations also show that quite a few of the series J-Novel Club has haven't even broken even. It would be a death sentence to the company to decrease the price.
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@sam-pinansky People who reads on and off like me don't really mind paying for memebership, but we are I think your most important customers for this site to advance in the future. So what I suggest is agree on a minimum price and don't divide members and premium members (like Netflix does). You could use opportunities to better promote other novels, better yet, try to promote the writers and then sell the readers back to the writers.
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@mianli Well there isn't actually any division between member and premium members: both can read the same content at the same time. Premium members is like "normal membership + discount ebook credits". It's more of a bundle than a "better membership".
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@hak0 I agree that times are hard and selling novels is really hard, but that is not an excuse to raise something above its true value. Such a system will sustain a product but it will never thrive and usually dies out quickly. A good solution is to find alternative, explore the main issues, not give excuses to raise price because the market demands it
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@sam-pinansky If that is truly so then the idea of a premium membership is weird, why not establish a credit system, or a discount system instead?
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@sam-pinansky I mean it would be great if you monitor trafict on specifict novels, total the number of people who read and buy it and sell that number back to the writers or licensing companies. Acts as a promoter and sell your service to them, demand some kind of funding. Use that funding to improve your page, crypto is dead now anyway.
I think what I really want to say is that spending money on membership and still having to buy expensive volumes on Amazon is not a good marketing scheme to target people like me. Trafict and cost efficientcy aside, it doesn't attract new potential reader to the genre and with the massive increase in licensing going on, I don't see a future for Japanese novels.
A product without a good promotion scheme doesn't last very long no matter how good an idea it is. This type of low priced simple product only really survive with support from new people who are attracted by marketing schemes. If your wish is to pioneer a way to promote Japanese Novels then I suggest choosing a different route of doing this.
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When we get about a dozen new series in the next couple weeks your subscription will be a lot more worth it.
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You can't find any book translated from Japanese cheaper than this unless they were printed in 10000s of copies. Especially not light novels. J-Novel Club's light novels are already 2-4$ cheaper than all the other companies. They cost pretty much the same as the Japanese version and that market hasn't died yet, but only expanded in the last few years.
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@hak0 Does the market truly expands though, say, do you see an ads on web novel? If not then they truly have not made any progress in promoting their product. The illusion of being able to connect to an audience or fan base that already exists is not truly expansion.
I don't really care about the pricing on market, numbers change, it's how the market works, what I'm emphasizing is that this marketing scheme does not work, if it is carried out in its current form.
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@legitpancake Well, that only happens if I stick around really. If people like me doesn't then whether or not something new comes out is of no consequence. This is not to criticize the site, I think it's great, very daring to do something like this but its marketing scheme needs to be fixed if it wants to survive
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@mianli what needs to change? Have you compared J-Novel to other companies? Yen Press has no membership program, but they offer physical books which are available in bookstores and online retailers for $14 retail, and most of their books cost $8 for ebooks. But they are very slow in their translation.
J-Novel is ebook only at the moment (although they have partnered with Seven Seas to offer some printed versions of some of their best selling novels), but the membership is very much worth it if you read just 2 series each month. I follow about a dozen series on this site, and to me the membership is awesome. If you don’t like the membership, that’s fine, just cancel and buy Amazon Kindle versions or whatever. But don’t come here and start threatening that the business will collapse, even though you have no idea as to the financial situation J-Novel is in.
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@legitpancake The most important change is the way they promote novels, currently there isn't a way to promote reading novels. Pricing is only so expensive is because they can't sell enough and have to make up for that by increasing their value in hope that their loyal customer will give them a helping hand.
This is fine if you wish to only act as a kind of independent retailer or part time promoter but to promote and attract new reader to the genre, to novel, you need a little more art to it.
Giving people a service they want is not promotion, it is simply reaching out
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@mianli They have a very active Twitter, and they will be hosting a panel with Japanese authors at Anime Expo in California during which they will announce quite a few new license acquisitions. Not to mention every one of J-Novel’s licenses get announced on Anime News Network and a good portion of their novels get book reviews on ANN since they provide free copies to reviewers. I’d say all in all that is a pretty good advertisement.
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@legitpancake I'm not here to argue what makes numbers go higher but the thing is, making people pay for membership, creating weird normal membership and premiums then directs them to a retailer on Amazon is not a good image
This system of letting people read for a bit then turns it off is not good for new people. That's what I see, that's what I say, but if I'm wrong then there is something wrong in the way they put everything together
I don't really do the whole fan thing, I only see value to value. And if their whole scheme is to create short term fans then I don't have anything to say.
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@mianli you have said previously that marketing is important and such, so you have been talking about what makes numbers go up....
The memberships don’t necessarily drive people to amazon the only way to buy the DRM free, high resolution e-books with bonus content is to be a member of this site.
So members can buy at $7 each just like on amazon (and $1 cheaper then the cheapest LN competitor) and premium members can get them for $6 each.
As for, “letting people read for a bit then turns it off” and how that’s not good for new people, JNC is frequently offering catch up months where all volumes are put back up for the subscribers. That value is unbeatable, if for instances someone wanted to read all of, The Faraway Paladin that’s 5 volumes, but this month for $4.95 they could have read them all...
Last thing I had to say
