[Suggestion] Novel Pricing
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English translated LNs are pricey for two reasons:
- The market is niche, and probably always will be. This means profit margins need to be higher on a per piece basis, and there is increased risk with new product never recovering costs.
- There's more work involved. The author and original publisher get their due (Google suggests around $5 per LN is average for Japan), then the translator and editor, then administrative overhead for JNC itself. Plus store fees if you'e not buying it straight from here. And now sales taxes in the US!
Adverts make no sense to me. I'm sure most of JNC's website traffic is from members to begin with. One of the most common perks of website membership is ad removal. Also, everything I've read says ads pay very little unless you're classified as an "influencer."
Membership is definitely a fan thing. I can totally understand a casual reader not really seeing the value. It's for people who read the prepubs and, for premium, buy a lot of books. If you only read one or two series, you're better off just buying them from Amazon, sure.
@mianli said in [Suggestion] Novel Pricing:
The price of anything ultimately is what the customer accept to pay. No one ever get the full story of where all the money go.
This does bug me. There's always a floor on the price - the sum of the value of the product's components, plus labor involved to assemble it. It's rare to see things sold deliberately at a loss. I know video game consoles are, but they make that up with game licensing, and they are sold by huge companies with money to spare. Otherwise your product is a failure, and you stop selling it.
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Now i don't know if the price is like that because it has to be or for some other reason but truly, the price of a single volume is quite high, some one new will not find that very attractive. I think it can be better.
The price they charge is what the market will bear. English translated LNs are an unavoidably niche product with many middlemen involved in their production between the consumer and the author, and cannot be priced like a cheap throwaway mass market paperback if they are to be profitable. If halving the price does not in turn more than double the number of customers, then you have gained nothing from a price drop. I'm sure the industry as a whole have very good data-driven methods of setting their prices beyond whether or not you personally think it's good value for money.
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@flarecde I understand production cost of a product with low market reach is high, what I'm saying is that, is blindly buying things at a high cost really helps it? Or does it merely sustain it.
The manufacturing process is not perfect due to lack of support, leading to low production and high material cost. Saying a market is niche is somewhat giving up on it really.
Well, thank you for your explanation. Just a thought though, I used to read this novel but since it's licensed now I'm not really sure. There is beauty in free/easier connection and knowledge you know
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You could argue the original LNs are overpriced, I guess? But I doubt our side market is going to make Japanese publishers decide to lower their native prices! I imagine they probably just view foreign language licensing as gravy.
The final option would be to own the whole vertical (author, publisher, translator, and editors). But that's a little out there considering the whole point is to bring over existing material.
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@flarecde although you are right about LNs being overpriced in Japan, the value of a product differ from place to place. As long as the base cost is covered and profit is acceptable, they have a margin for the price to vary in. Netflix subscription differs for country to country. I'm not sure what that margin is in term of LNs though
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Are there any legal manga reading sites that have ads? I can’t think of any. Yes, people selling something they don’t have the rights to can make money that way but I don’t think it’s worth it if you’re not stealing what you’re selling.
Also comparing the price of Harry Potter to Light Novels is crazy. Harry Potter sells millions and millions of copies and keeps selling many years later. They can charge less because they’ve made their costs back many times over. Your comparison of value to value comes with little economic understanding. Compare the prices of LNs and mid to low tier teen novels/ you go adult novels with similar page counts and you’ll see that barring a few exceptions even without licensing fees, the prices are similar.
In fact many things are far more expensive of a cost per time of enjoyment. Heck look at Western Comics, they’re 4-5 dollars American a pop and take 5-10 minutes to read. If you’re willing to look at the value of illegal items such as scanlation sites, then you’ll also notice the price proportionate for cocaine use to the time of pleasure it allots is much higher than Light Novels also. Plus you run the risk of it being laced with something harmful, something you don’t ave to worry about with JNC novels. So you could just as easily argue Light Novels are on the cheaper end of the spectrum with both other legal and illegal goods.
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@the-green-death What i'm suggesting is not stealing but merely a redistribution of profit. Say you turn a profit by running ads, you can then use that profit to make up loses were you to lower price. Not all ads are harmful, FB do ads all the time. Ads are not meant to be harmful really, if not why do they even bother advertising
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@mianli Facebook has many millions of users (probably more users than the number of people left who read for pleasure), it’s not a like for like situation. I can think of many situations where ads would be profitable, I just don’t imagine that it would be for a company like JNC.
Reading books for pleasure in the modern era is a niche practice. Light Novels are a niche of a niche. For ads to become profitable you need to get a lot of passive views to turn into engagement and a lot of engagement before a sale is made. Ads work due to huge bulk of people who interact with them, I just don’t see Light Novels being able to draw that number of ad views, thus the money isn’t made.
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@the-green-death So you are saying this site is so insignificant that they won't turn a profit running ads? Any site can run ads really
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As a rule of thumb, if a business provides you a service for free, then you are most likely their product. If you as a site enable ads you enable tracking by ad services, meaning you get paid for allowing gathering information on your customers as well as showing them targeted ads.
You also need to remember it is not site costs they have to cover, but licensing fees and localization costs. To turn a profit from ads you need a lot more hits compared to selling their products, so it is not a viable business strategy for this.
And anyway, what is the issue if it's profitable enough like this? If you don't like the subscription service you can just buy the ebooks when they come out. It was quite clear what being a member gives you. -
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In another world with my smartphone is around $8.74 on Japanese Bookwalker
Grimgar is around $5& I feel like you, guys, are forgetting some costs too.
Difference ain't that high, especially when there are many things to be done before it becomes a proper release like translation, cover designs, book layout designs, etc.
Like take a look at another example like Schoolgirl by Dazai
It's published in English by One Peace Books and it's one of most famous Dazai's novellas.
& it's by $9, even though it's shorter than LNs and have no illustrations either.Also, product price should be set with expenses like the site domain's coverage, any money paid for advertisement, etc. being in mind as well.
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@name I'm not suggesting their service be free because of ads, but the cost of Ebooks on Amazon can be reduced or they can give more discount by obtaining profit elsewhere, and what is with this tracking theory, ads are not human, they only give you information and collect information anonymously to give you better ads, one you would more likely buy. What is wrong with that? an algorithm which evolve to serve you? whether or not you choose to buy said product is entirely up to you.
Any website can turn a profit with ads, no matter how small really, Ads do not require you to click on them to generate profit for the one who runs the ads, all they need is exposure to the ads. Merely by being having it on is enough to turn profit
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@mianli I don’t think anyone is arguing that ads can’t make a little money, what we are saying is they can’t make enough money to significantly change the price like you want them to. You seem to doggedly ignore this argument.
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@the-green-death ? what do you mean? say mangafox used to run entirely on ads. Ofcourse I don't have the exact number to say how much profit it would gather nor can I say for sure if it makes a different but really now, does it hurt to try? Or would you rather just you and a couple of people can afford to read LN because all of it is licensed?
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@the-green-death With how much a volume costs right now I can say for certain that most people can't afford it but think about it if each of them donate just $1 to the author, that makes a different. They are not stealing, they want to donate and enjoy the content but are unable to. Is it fair to generalize and limit a form of entertainment to only a certain number of people?
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@mianli Pretty much the only costs they have are for the servers.
J-Novel are a professional company and as such actually pay their translators and pay licencing fees to the copyright owners instead of stealing the work done by fan translators.
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@mianli said in [Suggestion] Novel Pricing:
Any website can turn a profit with ads, no matter how small really,
Merely by being having it on is enough to turn profit
[citation needed]
You're probably stretching the definition of profit really far.does it hurt to try?
If by "try" you mean make everything free then it's a very risky business decision that may or may not require approval from Japanese partners and it's not like you can easily "untry" it if it doesn't work well.
If you mean doing some kind of limited run to see how well it works (and estimate whether or not you will get 2x free users at expense of having paying users and end up loosing money) it's already done with Rokujouma and Isekai Mahou. -
@mianli Mangafox is a pirate site, the same metrics don’t apply. They are stealing their content.
I can sell TVs far cheaper if I steal them, that doesn’t mean Amazon should match my prices.
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@mianli Umm, I do not even know what you are trying to say here. are you saying ppl should "donate" 1 dollar and just so happen to get a free LN (where the aftermath is Companies lose tons of money and we lose tons of LN due to it)? Also, what do you even mean by "Is it fair to generalize and limit a form of entertainment to only a certain number of people?" How is it limiting in the first place? creators make money off their pieces of art and entertainment and because of that they can make even more art and entertainment. This make more art and entertainment while giving it all out for free or heavily underprice will not.
Some questions for you:
Is it fair that Authors and Publishers want to make money so they can survive and can provide even more entertainment? Is it fair that there are countless pirate sites that run Virus-filled ads and make money off of stealing from the creators? Is it fair that you need a computer to read JNC series and that computers cost quite a bit of money, something you would probably not get if you are in great need of money. -
@mianli What you are arguing for is the abolishment of copyright and the return of the patronage system that existed during the renaissance.
Practically, even at its most extreme, if say for example I ran an unskippable 60 second video commercial prior to reading each part, and that commercial was a high value ad like ~$7 CPM, and let's assume that 100% of our monthly active users (~30,000) read 50% of the parts we upload... Every month we upload ~70 new parts, so that's 35 * 30,000 ~=1 million impressions. Therefore $7,000 in revenue per month from advertisement. Wow!
Except wait a minute. 70 new parts a month is ~ 9 volumes per month. Each volume costs about $4,000 to fully localize. That's $36,000 in expenses just from localization. Doh!
Also wait a second... that $7 CPM only applies to users who live in the US and Canada and other 1st world countries... which only make up ~50% of those 30,000 unique users.
So really revenue from that add would only be $3,500 a month.But wait! Who actually reads 50% of our content? Even if it was free most people only read 4-5 series max. That's 20 parts a month, not 35. So really it's only $2,000 in ad revenue.
Okay okay... But that $2,000 is still something, right? We currently sell about 30,000 ebooks every month. If we take that $2,000, we could discount the price of each of our ebooks by............
$0.07!
All for the cost of 1 unskippable video add before being able to read parts!
(Oh, but I didn't account for the loss of the $20,000 or so a month of subscription revenue we would lose from making reading free... Guess I have to actually RAISE ebook prices by $0.63 instead!)
Now I know what you want to say: But if the subscription is free you'll get a TON more readers! Yes, but not nearly enough. It would have to be a 250 times increase to come close to breaking even.
tldr; I have done the math. The math doesn't work for ad-supported.
