January 2023 Livestream!
-
@Ran - @Microdynames might have been speculating or speaking in hyperbole when they said Rebuild World was running a loss. AFAIK, the staff hasn't confirmed one way or the other (at least not on the forums), just that it was doing significantly worse than Blacksmith.
-
@83drew It's not surprising, all remotely tech-related companies are incredibly
analyticsdriven.It's also not surprising. Rebuild world is one of those titles that has a very specific market, both in tone/style and in genre.
I like cyberpunk but it easily lost me before the end of the first volume. It's overly dense and doesn't actually have significant literary merit to meet that denseness. YMMV, but it feels like what I referenced above, a 'tryhard' work. Someone pushing themselves instead of having fun.
And Light Novels aren't just Genre fiction, they're Niche foreign genre fiction. The market almost certainly isn't people that want "Serious" works, it's people that want silly pap (I love silly pap, for the record). I'm in a different field (video games) but
BlacksmithoutsellingRebuildisn't at all surprising.Final thought, one I had to learn the hard way in work, we can't generalize from ourselves. There's a tendency to think our own tastes are absolute and show what everyone likes, but that's almost always incorrect. One of the basic truisms of design is Never design for yourself, but for your market.
Granted, Naru based LNs are a bit of different, but that same decision point falls on the publishers, and plenty of authors who write for themselves never see the light of day. The system there allows easy filtering of what the (JP) Market wants, which makes picking works easy, if you can avoid a bidding war.
Companies like JNC also have that advantage, because they can potentially look at both Naru numbers and JP sales. The trick is that the US market (even amongst us weebs) is pretty different than the JP market, so you might get some misfires, and JNC specifically is competing with some big, and publisher-owned companies.
Edit: If it's not clear, I'm not at all shocked by Rebuild World's (apparent) performance. I can see several reasons why it's potentially alienating. And always remember, companies are made to make money, not to raise the discourse (It's not relevant, but I can go on a 6 hour speech about the ethics and creative implications of monetizing mobile games)
Logic is out, Unreasonableness is in!
-
So...can we interest you fine ladies & gentlemen into joining the Licensing Suggestion crusade/ritual for a long 2014 series that's totally not going to bomb if it does actually get licensed ;D
-
Like you said, the results didn’t surprise me. I’d believe that’s the case with their respective sales.
I just hadn’t seen any data posted and wondered where that 10x figure came from.
-
@akashicwiki said in January 2023 Livestream!:
that's totally not going to bomb if it does actually get licensed ;D
Where did these several thousand red flags come from?
Time to get the bulldozer out... -
@piisfun said in January 2023 Livestream!:
Where did these several thousand...flags come from?
I'd love for JNC to license If Her Flag Breaks (Japanese: 彼女がフラグをおられたら, Hepburn: Kanojo ga Furagu o Oraretara), and my 699 coins will totally justify the costs, right?
It's taken decades, but I've finally learned to accept that just because I love a book, music album, game, food, etc. that doesn't mean everyone else will. Also that other people love many things that I do not and that's OK.
-
@83drew They'll never post direct data (or I'd be shocked if they did), that stuff is pretty tightly under
trade secretsand reflects on the monetary health of the company I don't think JNC is public or anything, but those numbers have a big impact if published, so nobody ever shares them.(I've known people in games that got in big trouble for leaking analytics data, even for minor stuff)
Edit: The 10x seems made up (or I missed a comment or 2), but from the official statements in this thread the gap in sales is clearly substantial.
-
@Windsagio To be fair, it took seeing scanlations of the manga get to a certain point before I even bothered to go see if there were TLs for the WN. The series does start off pretty rough, and since there's no anime, I can't do what I've seen people do with something like bookworm and say just just jump into Part 2 after watching the first anime season. I think the story only really starts to pick up once the MC gets strong enough that he's able to mostly start standing on his own during normal combat.
But you're right, the story is mostly going to appeal more to people who enjoy post-apocalypse style scenarios, ones where things are more tech driven rather than "I've been reincarnated with a superpower".
@Windsagio said in January 2023 Livestream!:
Edit: The 10x seems made up (or I missed a comment or 2), but from the official statements in this thread the gap in sales is clearly substantial.
10x (actually more than 10x) is what Sam said based on their data, but also explained that you could extrapolate the 10x based on the amazon ranking for both series once you understand how amazon rankings work.
@admin said in January 2023 Livestream!:
@Ran blacksmith sells more than 10 times better than rebuild world
@admin said in January 2023 Livestream!:
@83drew ...our accounting records. Various sales reporting from amazon and other stores.
And I can say something like that because you can just look at the amazon kindle sales ranking and get basically the same answer publicly.
Rebuild world second volume came out in nov, it's currently Amazon ranking 158,432
Blacksmith 4 came out in october, it's currently ranking 23,334If you do some research you can find that amazon rankings have like a logarithmic correlation to sales, etc etc...
Basically that ranking says blacksmith sells ~12 copies a day and rebuild <1 (that's below the threshold for estimation at that ranking).
Now you can argue that the "enthusiast" doesn't use kindle, and that's definitely true. Our core audience buys on bookwalker and/or JNC premiums. So the lower the amazon sales the higher percentage of all sales come from those stores. In a way, that means there is kind of a floor to our sales usually. But it doesn't outweigh even close a factor of 10 from amazon sales.
-
@jpwong I guess my point is they're free to share numbers, but never ever expect it.
That's serious data that directly relates to a company's financials.
Edit: Thanks for the tip on where the 10x came from.
...
That said, it would be fun to see some serious breakdowns, I'd bet the genre breakdowns specifically are just incredibly predictable. (In the specific case, I just don't enjoy rebuild that much and don't think it's that well written, but see above about generalizing from personal taste)
-
@Windsagio During an internal town hall presentation we had a few weeks ago I shared some genre based sales data from sales 2021->2022 to around ~80+ freelancers attending (all under NDA, but I mean, people talk).
JNC Heart does "good enough" but is unable to break into the top ~30% of best sellers no matter how popular the series, and the top sellers within the category like Tearmoon and Bakarina are arguably crossover titles and not exactly Heart. Strong correlation is seen also with heart with anything that has too "shoujo" looking art on the cover, knocking sales down strongly.
Romcoms universally sell poorly. The best-selling romcoms we have seem to be ones with the sexiest art on the cover. No romcom has broken into top 50% of selling volumes. Anime adaptations give sales a temporary 3-4 times boost, but 3-4 times still barely makes them profitable, if at all.
Classic series like full metal/slayers sell terribly, 100% of the time. Only print editions sell for those. Later volumes of classic series can sell <100 copies each digitally. So our ability to license classic series is tied to our ability to put out print editions (otherwise we're looking at 5-figure losses for longer series.)
"Classic" seems to apply even to series from like, 2015 or 2016.
-
Wow, that’s… understandable, but still rough. I guessed that the shoujo genre would be tough to attract fans because the same shit happens in manga, but damn.
The whole thing about classics suck too. Could it possibly be due to the fact that series that old may have fan translations already?
-
@Torka They only buy print editions and/or there aren't that many of them to begin with. It's a classic "vocal minority" issue.
One thing that's interesting is that looking at bookscan numbers, even the MOST popular light novel series like overlord seem to have a pretty low sales ceiling compared to manga (in print).
In my opinion the overall market size for light novels in print is actually smaller than the digital market. We've seen multiple series selling 25K plus copies digitally, but I think only sword art online ever reached that physically, and that was over like 10 years + of sales. So who are these digital light novel buyers? They aren't the same people who are buying print editions of things like slayers. They are people who enjoy reading novels online, like webnovels, or people who enjoy genre ficition in general on kindle, for example.
They are people attracted by google play or amazon's algorithms with "if you liked this, you'll love this" suggestions. They are people who are looking for the cheapest/easiest way to read the story of an anime they watched to see what happens next, etc.Here's a simple fact: oversummoned is (as a certain reddit mod would say) an "axed" light novel series. When we announced it people derided the choice (and somewhat correctly deduced it was mostly because we wanted the manga, which is also selling some of the best of any manga we do).
(that being said, the official status of these novels is "unscheduled", aka they could publish future volumes if they want to.)
This status was known to the community, certain people definitely crowed very hard about it.
And yet, for some reason, vol 1/2 sold extremely well. They are still selling 4-5 copies every day.This tells me basically, that the community of people actually buying the epubs is quite different than the the community which is complaining about axed series or series that "are too new", for example.
-
@admin That all sounds very logical and practical, but where is your SOUL?
On a more serious note the cohort of webnovel/genre fiction reading Kindle casuals despite their numbers sound like a very fickle lot that you would have to throw stuff at twice as hard just to retain in the same numbers like a Red Queen effect because of how much other stuff competes for their attention, compared to the fanatics who will just buy everything reliably as long as it isn't what they consider beneath them
-
@Microdynames So you are making a chase after the fickle masses vs. satisfy your base argument? JNC has always at least attempted to walk that tight rope, and we will continue to do so.
Sometimes it seems we are leaning one way or the other but yes, I understand the necessity of frankly, doing both. -
@admin not really chasing an argument, just trying to observe why the volume of "trash" may be necessarily so high for the thread in general, in a "man, that sounds rough" sort of way. Wasn't directed antagonistically at you specifically, sorry. The SOVL thing was just a shitpost, I'm sure Discommunication had enough soul in it to make a Philosopher's Stone
-
@admin That's amazing information, thank you for sharing and being so open!
It's a weird unique space, sounds like.
-
@Microdynames said in January 2023 Livestream!:
ls despite their numbers sound like a very fickle lot that you would have to throw stuff at twice as hard just to retain in the same numbers like a Red Queen effe
This again is coming from a slightly different industry (but still fully online), but taken in mass fans generally are not fickle, but are incredibly predictable.
Some of the info @admin gave us makes a ton of sense in that realm, I can definitely feel the 'sexy art' thing, we use that shamelessly in games too at certain moments. Similarly the shojo/romcom thing. I'm kind of impressed there's any market for that in English speaking regions at all (and some of my favorite works on here are in that genre!)
Vocal superfans are very tricky to cater to, they're often substantially out of sync with the market as a whole.
Logic is out, Unreasonableness is in!
-
@Windsagio said in January 2023 Livestream!:
Vocal superfans are very tricky to cater to, they're often substantially out of sync with the market as a whole.
That sounds an awfully lot like movie critics vs. actual audience opinions...
Green's Theorem
-
@piisfun It's a little different, in that critics are supposed to be experts, but there's also a gap there.
What's good and What sells are not necessarily related (this is made worse because 'what's good' is super subjective).
I'd compare it really directly to the <insert fantasy series> megafans who get mad when a beloved character isn't presented truly enough to the source material. From a business perspective those people are gonna buy either way, even if they claim otherwise, so you don't worry about them. You make your product for everyone, not just the ones that are already sold.
In movies it's tricky too, because there's a lot of hype and a lot of perceived value. I've worked with a lot of former LucasArts people for instance, and the reality was that anything with the Star Wars IP will sell and will make big money, as long as you hit some basic levels of quality. Fans of Star Wars will buy it, and many (as with the movies) will convince themselves it's good because they knew it was good before they saw it. That rule doesn't directly apply to LN's because at least over here most people don't know and certainly don't have special loyalty to a series coming in, but it's def a thing to movies. Avatar 2 was going to make a ton of money whether it was good or not, and because of Avatar 1.
-
@Windsagio Maybe there is a bit of the above, everyone seems to have known that Seventh was by the "Side character in an otome game" guy, dunno if it actually drove any sales though (most of what I saw was "Man why does he hate sisters so bad?")
