Upcoming JNC light novel price increases
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@poisonedbite Well, I'll bite. (perhaps given your usename that's not a good idea, but...)
Right now, when it comes to J-Novel Club's expenses as a business, about 25% of those expenses are for localization, 40% are for content rights/royalties, etc, and 35% is for employees and all other business expenses.
The content rights are pretty much proportional to sales, so raising prices actually raises those cost proportionally, and we already gave our employees about a 10% raise at the beginning of the year.
So in other words, giving an approximately 33% raise to our freelancer rates increases our overall expenses at JNC by about 8%. I don't know what you think profit margins are at publishers like ours, but they definitely aren't like 50%. We cannot afford to have an 8% increase in costs with no increase in revenue. e-book novel sales account for around 75% of our revenue. Raising prices by $1 (+14%) would then raise our overall revenue by around 10%. That covers the 8% increase in costs. The extra 2% is there to account for the lower total sales that the higher price will possibly cause.
So yes, this price increase is matched up as best I can with the freelancer rate increase.
Why are we raising prices on all books and not just the new ones? Because that 75% e-book revenue is sales of our entire catalog, not just the new releases. About 50% of our ebook sales are "backcatalog" in any month. If we only raised prices on new books, we would have to raise them by $2 instead of $1 to account for the difference.
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@BartzBB Do you mind to share what other LN publisher sells on their store, provided we can share them here?
The reason I'm asking is that all other publishers that I buy from, like Yen Press, Sol Press (RIP), and Seven Seas Entertainment, don't sell on their own store. I'd be interested in buying directly if possible, especially if they sell epub with no DRM as I like to use my own reader.Thank you in advance!
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@christantoan
Other than JNC I only know 2 and one of them has not officially started selling books on their own.Tentai - a new Spanish/English LN publisher. They sell Physical and Digital copies on their site.
Hanashi Media - a new Spanish/English LN publisher. As of now they don't sell on their own store but they say that it's in the works so in the future it would be possible to buy directly from.
PS: I just checked and Hanashi Media has not published any books yet since they just started this year.
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@BartzBB - I hope Hanashi Media does get up to speed and are faster with releases than Tentai -- Fruit of Evolution was a silly fun anime so I'd like to read more of the story.
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I’m just a bit curious, why are only LN freelancer rates raising? Is that just because manga pricing isn’t changing, or are manga freelancer rates already paired with the market?
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While I see no harm in raising pay to staff (translations are great), the timing is definitely intentional with the conversion to coins and their devaluation. I'd bought a bunch of credits a while ago during one of the sales, knowing I'd eventually get the same number of volumes in return. But apparently those will now be worth less than 1 volume each whenever the price increases happen. The conversion was advertised as a way to make sales possible, and while that is true, now it seems the opposite is happening.
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@seltzermx Keep in mind nothing is changing in regards to that yet, the price of premium ebooks here is staying 699 coins which is still what the conversion rate of credits to coins is set to. There's no doubt that will probably change in the future, but it's likely not going to happen until the next round of price increases given that direct sales don't have other middlemen taking huge cuts of the sales prices.
Hopefully we'll get the whole how will sales work thing worked out soon because how I buy things will definitely change depending is sales of coins will be (further) discounted, if ebook prices will be discounted or if they'll be doing both. I'm not too concerned about an eventual premium ebook cost increase even though I'll be converting a reasonable amount of credits over because almost all of my credit purchases were on discount already, so it would take a significant price hike to offset the amount I saved initially.
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I don’t expect JNC to share all of the internal costs/ business expenses etc (I don’t need to know ‘how the sausage is made’) but I do know JNC is not a manufacturer, and that most of their products are “soft” - that means that much of their expenses are also: labor, licensing, etc.
unemployment is low, inflation is high, this puts upward “pressure” on wages, JNC has to increase revenue to cover the costs. (Plus JNC's suppliers have increased costs as well that they’ve passed on. (Technology like networking gear, computers, software licensing (Adobe, Microsoft) website hosting rates, etc.))A higher “cover price” (in line with the rest of the industry) seems appropriate. I think the $6.99 was in place for many years. Inflation is a thing
Also kudos to JNC for raising compensation to talent, they deserve it
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What about pre-orders on Amazon? Would the price raise there as well or would the pre-order price be locked in?
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@saidahgilbert With amazon preorders you generally pay the lowest amount that the item was whilst you had the preorder, so you should get it at the original price or lower. Check for the amazon preorder guarantee.
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How long until the 699 coins aren't enough to buy a volume? When that happens will the amount of coins that subscribers get increase per month? Will subscribers eventually only get part of the cost of a volume per month?
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@Planguy I believe that it's been mentioned on the discord that any price increase in premium epubs will also result in an identical increase in the number of coins premium subscribers get since the idea is that you get 1 free regular priced premium ebook per month. This is all unofficial discussion as the price of premium ebooks is not being increased at this time.
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As far as I know, Cross Infinite World does not sell books directly on their website, but I have been able to buy their books DRM-free on Kobo.
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@LegitPancake your hunch is half correct. Our manga rates are already roughly equivalent to other industry players (and significantly higher than a lot of the lower quality digital manga places and agencies). Also, digital manga is still not particularly profitable, so raising prices is not advisable for those books. This also helps to lower the gap between manga and ln prices which I think is healthier in the long term.
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I applaud this change and I appreciate the efforts to be transparent about it. Occasional price increases are a net benefit for us as consumers, as long as JNC applies them in moderation.
Light novels can last for 20+ volumes, so we want quality freelancers to stick around for the long-term and see their projects through to completion. The alternative is being cheap, which runs the risk of inconsistent translations and unstable staffing.
In general, investing in your talent is a smart idea for any business because it incentivizes retention. I'd prefer long-term stability over short-term savings any day.
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@admin I’ve gotta say, I’m impressed with both the decision to support your freelancers, as well as the lengths you guys are going to with your transparency, including giving rough numbers for business expenses.
Kudos to the whole J-Novel team; glad to be a patron of an outfit as respectable as this one.
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@strangeattractor
Wow, nice! I don't know you can sell e-book without DRM on 3rd party sites. -
@christantoan Kobo allows the option to sell books DRM Free for the seller.
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This was exactly my fear when they moved from a credit to a coin system.
If they do plan on changing the prices for the whole catalogue in coin value, if they don't give at least 1 years warning, they're potentially in a situation of miselling.
Le sigh.
I'm happy that translators are getting paid more though! Just wish everything was a bit more transparent at the outset.
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@Travis-Butler This is retrospective to the current catalogue so gives 0 benefit to translators.
My understanding is that translators are free lance, so are self-employed and get paid based on the work they do rather than salaried. They don't get a % cut of the total sales, they get a pre-decided sum.
The increase in translator pay will only benefit prospectively - future translations. So, if sales continue at current volume, the money made will be much greater than the increase in labour costs.
So, in this regard both you and poisonedbite have a point.
Generally digital products that are fungible never go over their initial sale price, and in many instances they will end up cheaper over time from the date of release. This is irrespective of the the actual type of digital media. [Commercial Software/Games/Books/Music/Art etc]
[Please note that labour is not an ongoing cost for an individual product it is a one off payment, unless a rev share is agreed with translators (very doubtful)]
