People over at the J Novel Club are knock off Yakuza
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I am fully aware that most fan translations, of which I frequent many such sites, are copyright infringement save for fair use or rights holder-approval. However, I don't support the donation aspect of any of these unless it was proven the translations are rights-holder approved. Call me a "pirate" if you want, but even I have standards regarding fan translations. On the ironic side, I frequently use my FB profiles to rant about the deprivation of the Amer. public domain.
Also, let's be honest here about piracy (this coming from a copyright minimalist largely thanks the Disney Empire lobbying for longer copyright terms): it very much hurts entertainment sales. However, it sometimes helps sale in the sense that a person enjoying the fansub, scanlation, or LN fan translation may be willing to a legit copy of the work to support the industry. Also, fan translations of a particular title could be popular enough that an official license for that work is established.
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@jnovelaremonsters
What truly rips me a new crack in my ass is the pricing of LN's.
I can pick up any full length paper back novel ( examples with Word Counts @125,000+ [Card's Enders Game's "Speaker for the Dead" 382 pages], @300,000+ [Martin's "A Feast for Crows"] to over 415,000 [Martin's "A Dance with Dragons"]) written here in the US for under $10. Though all these Japanese Light Novels with around a 50,000-60,000 word count cost about that much just in EPUB & $12-$14 each if I wanted them in paper back format.
As far as I am concerned the publishers can go to hell with the rest of the Yakuza (Mafia in my Italian heritage) & the other price gougers around this world. I will continue to find free uploads of these LN's untill they learn to price them accordingly, that'd be @ $2-$4 each at most or at least 4-10 LN's combined into 1 if they want a $7-$8 epub or $12-$14 P.B. price tag paid for them. -
@bravo0723 Seriously? $2-$4? LOL
As long as you look only at the words count you're not going anywhere. You are comparing apples with oranges. You are comparing a novel written in english with a novel written in japanese that NEEDS to be translated and re-edited before it gets published. Do you think translators and editors work for free? Nice try. Now go back in your corner and think again before writing anything more.
P.S.: Also with a premium subscription each (digital) LN on this site costs a "mere" $6.
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EDIT: One more thing. You want bulk releases of up to 10 LNs for $7-$8? First you say each LN should be $2-$4 but then you want 10 of them for $8? $4 * 10 = $40 USD. Basically you want an ~80% discount for purchasing 10 LNs in bulk? Wow. Who's the Mafia/Yakuza again, now?
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@anzer
They are paid excessively far to much.
The "Good" American Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Fiction novel writers here live lavishly writting paperbacks that are 4x-8x the word length of LN's while selling them for only 3/4's the price.
There are some decent LN's out there but I'll be damned if there are more than 4-6 half way original concepts to find behind their stories.
It seems that anything that makes a buck gets 10-20 more writters trying to write the same story with just a little different variation to the substsnce of it. And by God, get off this 9-12 year old loli bullshit in every thing that is published. In Petter Seller's "Lolita", she was like 14-16 while the actress that played her was 17 & had turned 18 @ the time of it's release. -
Bulk Discounts for longer/completed series would be nice.
Of course, not $7-8 unless Sam wants a fire-sale on a series.
For example, sell all of My Big Sister Lives in a Fantasy World for the price of 6 books rather than 7.
Maybe advertise it as part of whatever the two free monthly series are. Make it limited to only while those two series are on the free rotation.
"Read these two series for free! Find yourself loving it and wanting to own it and read whenever you like? Here's a bulk option."
I mean there are a lot of manga I would love to support but I'm not buying 40+ volumes individually.
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You have no idea what you’re talking about, I’m going to run through a list of just how little you actually know.
1- when a new Fantasy novel is first released they are between $25-35, they do not drop in price until well after release
2- nearly all authors of such works do not live lavishly, I have spoken to some at conventions and they at times even need to take second jobs to make ends meet
3- j novel isn’t just publishing novels they must translate it into another language, this takes both time and money
4- j novel needs to pay for the license from the original Japanese publisher, again raising costs
5- this is a very niche market it is simply not large enough to drop the price point in an attempt to increase sales
6- if j novel is profiteering so much why is it that between 1/4 to 1/3 of the series they have licensed are not making a profit
You’re just being selfish and self-entitled, you just want everything for free or damn near to it without any care for the hard work people are putting into it.
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The idea that the average American Sci-Fi writer lives lavishly is the funniest thing I’ve heard all day.
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The idea that a translated light novel must be priced $2-4 is the most stupid thing I've ever seen all day. It's like saying to pay the Japanese publishers $1, translators and editors get $0.25, and lastly JNC itself gets $0.50 per book.
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your argument seems to boil down to: "I don't want to pay market rates for 'x'"
compare ebooks to ebooks at least - JNC ONLY published ebooks
a quick search on amazon shows the kindle editions of enders game at $7.99 and a feast for crows at $9.99. Typical novella length works are between $5 and $8. New releases of sci-fi or fantasy ebooks are often between $12 and $20. Yen press and other publishers of translated works sell their ebooks for around the same and JNC. What exactly are you complaining about?
ebooks are not priced solely on length, and pricing of ebooks (in ANY genre) doesn't always follow the cost of a paperback. (in the USA, Paperbacks are typically releases after a publisher has paid out an authors advance w/ hardcover sales. and Royalties paid to authors reflect THAT cover price, ebooks carry a similar amount of royalty $$ to the author, The Japanese market( and the translated 'after' market) is a different animal)
a kindle edition is usually slightly less expensive than whatever the 'most current' hard copy release is when GRRM released his latest song of ice and fire books, it was a HARDCOVER and the hard copy costs are between $18-25 with ebooks a$15 or $16
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@Bravo0723 One more thing: Western paperback full-length books are what's called "mass-market paperback" because they expect to sell thousands and thousands of copies at very cheap prices and very cheap production costs. Game of Thrones is insanely popular, so it easily justifies getting a mass-market paperback, and it can be priced so cheaply because it is basically guaranteed to sell.
- Across 6 books, GoT sold 8 million books in 2012 alone.
- In 2013, the e-book editions of those books hit 1.7 million sales.
- In 2014, after the TV series had been airing for 3 years, the mass-market paperback for A Game of Thrones (book 1) sold over a million copies by itself.
For any other less-successful series, though, the required number of sales for a mass-market paperback edition to break even is 10,000. For JNC, the number of e-book sales they need to break even is about 1,500, and they are currently losing money on a number of series. And you're comparing them to Game of Thrones?
You want parity between one of the most successful fantasy series in history and a localization company in a niche market still working on finding its feet. "Unfair" is a tame way to put how you're acting about it.
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@terabyte
AEE YIU THAT IGNORANT YOU IDIOT?
READ MY WHOLE STATEMENT "AT LEAST 4-10 LN's"
Obviosly the larger ones like those closer to 60,000 words EACHwould be closer to only 4 or 5 while those around 30,000 would require a lot more to equal the writings of a true novel.
As for translation rates
www.translated.net/en/translation-ratesUsing the 3rd option the most expensive one 60,000 words with 2 Professional Teanslaters & a project supervisor guaranteed proofreader it would only cost at most $7766 but most likely a lot less as I used there 3,000 word count x20 & each progressive wird count increase has a reduction in cost.
Anyone that has ever done business knows that they have to invest in there product to get greater sales. So the ones that are decent writers, not the whole community of knockoff idiots putting out inferior crap would then have their publisher be out @ $26,000 at most to have translated 4 LN's into a reasonable sized paperback novel wotrh publishing in the US where at $8.99-$9.99 as the market stands for printed work (yes, I know many say a few $ more on the cover now this past year but they are akways reduced to under $10 within a month or 2) & under $3-$4 for kindle versions they can make a killing in the US market with a larger gathering of readers willing to purchase them as they are used to purchasing the good novels released here.
Authors that make it big on just 1 top seller for a handful or so of weeks live high on the hog off the royalties. Especially those that follow up with works each year or so that is just decent enough to keep readers remembering their names & looking into there older works.
Like King & Card & even those past away lije Hubbard, Crichton, Asimov & PKD are still raking in royalties for their families. -
Really, for the rest of you that replied, I'm not going to bother with replying to each name.
Your talking the $20 $25+ prices for new releases is for HARDBACKS & we are talking about mass market paperback books here.
Also, READ MY WHOLE Fμ©<ING POST. YOUR ALL IGNORANTLY ACTING LIKE THE LIBERALS OF OUR COUNTRY RESPONDING TO WHAT WORDS YOU DISAGREE WITH.
I Explicitly said the "good" authors in my post, not the average ones.
Just because so many Japanese Idiots think they can write material that is basicly the same as something a good author came up with is no reason to get excited about their works. They should be a hell of a lot cheaper as us just for their ignorance in not coming up with new quality material.Also, I am not pointing out just J-Novel, I am refering to the likes of Yen Press & any other puplishers out there putting out all the crap that is flooding there markets. Let them make a deal with Doubleday or some American Publisher for their Good Authors & they'll make a fortune off (quality + quantity) not there usual (quantity + quantity + quantity + quant etc.... ).
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Quite succinctly: You're an idiot. Work a job, get money, buy things. If you don't think they're 'worth it', don't buy the books. They aren't going to lower their prices due to your juvenile tirades.
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Nothing against a spirited debate of fan-translations vs official translations (which is what this thread was originally about) but since it has just boiled down into childish name calling and frivolous insults I will be locking down this post.
Other then that it was an old post that was resurrected with nothing more to add.
