[CONTEST OVER] JNC Original Light Novel Contest
-
This is an exciting contest and I look forward to seeing what it ends up inspiring.
What's your definition of a light novel for this light novel content? Does it need to have some connection to Japan or Japanese people? Or would for example a typical Western litRPG or YA fantasy story count as a light novel? Is it basically just anything goes but because it is being judged based on what typical JNC readers are likely to be interested in reading people will want to bear that audience in mind to maximise their chances of being judged highly? Or is the accuracy of cultural depiction a relevant factor and so people might be best sticking to their own culture or a fictional culture to avoid being marked down?
-
@Shiny that's a lot of hard questions.
Maybe the way I'd put it is: your work should contain at least some of the same kind of things that make popular japanese light novels liked by our readers at J-Novel Club, whatever that might be. It's incredibly subjective of course.
Light novel isn't a genre, or a medium, but much like shoujo or shounen it's more defined by the publisher label the book is published under.
So I guess that means anything you submit to the contest becomes a light novel automatically! -
For the synopsis, are you looking for something that would be suitable as an actual volume preview like used on this site, or an actual summary of events including endgame spoilers?
-
@zwabbit we will leave that decision up to you!
Whatever you think will appeal to the judges more. -
@Rinvelt I mean, there's no point considering where the line is for Amazon when you can find what is clearly and unambiguously porn on there that's still being sold.
It's probably best to think of Amazon bans as a thunderstorm.
How far are they from the center of the storm (how vulgar is the content)?
How tall are they (how popular is the book)?
What outfit are they wearing—do they have on lots of conductive metal (aiming at a younger audience) or are they wearing rubber boots (aiming at an adult audience)?
These are all factors in how likely it is they get struck by lightning (banned from Amazon), but there are no guarantees. With enough data, scientists can create models for deeply chaotic systems like the weather. But in the end, even the best models can only give you probabilistic predictions.Look up. How dark are the clouds above? Is where you're going worth running through the rain for?
-
@Leon_97 So... you're saying as long as everyone in the story is wearing a raincoat.........
-
@admin and rubber boots, don't forget the rubber boots. Pink scented latex for me, please. (Damn, there goes my AFF background again)
-
@admin said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
@Angelus here is the easiest way to known whether your work crosses that line: "can this work be sold on Amazon?"
Fyi jk haru was, eventually, banned by Amazon (but only the ebook and not the print and it took years)...
So jk haru is like, right on the line.
So it is okay to reach JK Haru levels of smexy then? What about violence? For example, several volumes of "The Hero Laughs While Walking the Path of Vengeance a Second Time" is available for sale on Amazon right now.
My novel, for example, gets pretty bad with characters being cut up while alive during one subarc and a subarc after. (Might be worse than in Overlord). It is kind of an important situation for my MC since those are the points where they start to change the way they think (the turn from hero to villain) and the point where they give up on humanity in general and start treating humans as resources, but it is fairly cruel.
(I'd like to also note that Japanese anime/manga seem to be regulated more harshly than non-Japanese and non-anime/manga media)
-
@Nol_Mimi_Reyalta as far as I know we have never had anything we published get banned on Amazon for violence.
-
Mumblemumble
Now on the third revision of the narrative for By Duty Bound. Which amounts to scraping/massively shifting ~50K words and counting. -
@zwabbit good luck!👍
I still have to write another 30+k words to finish my story grumble grumble grumble“There’s always a story. It’s all stories, really. The sun coming up every day is a story. Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.” ― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
-
How long can the synopsis be?
-
@Lily-Garden, I need another 30k too, I guess, which will leave me at 50k. My biggest problem is my obsessive urge to keep on revising things. The more I write, the longer it takes to revise, and so eventually once I reach around 60-65k words all I do is revise rather than write new stuff.
[Edit] And there I was revising an earlier chapter of my novel only to realise it has worrying similarities to Dietlinde's trugged-up antics in this week's Bookworm. But I have three witness to say I wrote it before then (OK, two of them are cats, but still).
After reading something captivating, book lovers simply need to talk about it with someone.
—Tearmoon Empire -
@Angelus And the third was yourself? :P
-
@Rinvelt said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
@admin said in [SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN!] JNC Original Light Novel Contest:
@Angelus here is the easiest way to known whether your work crosses that line: "can this work be sold on Amazon?"
Fyi jk haru was, eventually, banned by Amazon (but only the ebook and not the print and it took years)...
So jk haru is like, right on the line.
To be honest, I don't even know why JK Haru and LNs with some NSFW illustrations (or rather, that just show a little skin) are banned from amazon, but on the other hand, amazon allows TONS of HaremLit novels with NSFW covers and explicit sex scenes. It's just...weird. Maybe they don't like Japanese stuff?
Honestly, I'm betting it's a "cartoons and comic books are for kids" situation. An assumption that led to both of those mediums being sensored for decades.
Think of how Boomers and older think of video games as being for kids, but the average age of gamers has gone up. Since the generation that started playing video games has aged.
Amazon probably considers Light Novels and Manga to be teen and young adult. While LitRPG gets a pass because it's never had that demographic as its primary audience.
-
@Angelus Everything gets recycled and inspired by something else—your job is to not worry about that and figure out how to make it yours.
-
@Lily-Garden How’s is yours going? When writing is going well for me —it’s like all the pieces just start fitting together. But right now I am missing too many pieces for that to happen.
I don't even have an idea of what the last half or third of my story will look like. I have written a lot of dialogue between the three main characters but one or two of my other main characters are barely developed and my secondary characters have almost no dialogue. And I have only really just started my world-building. -
@jazzyjeoff Thanks for asking!
I’ve written the first thousand words, so I’m a bit behind schedule but once I get to the second chapter I expect to get the momentum going cause that’s when the meet-cute with the romantic interest happens and I have a very clear idea of how I want that to go.
I chose to make my narrative more episodic, dividing it into distinct chapters, because I figured it would be easier to write if I can break the book down into chunks.
Once I have the brain-width and can knock out a few thousand more words I expect it to go more smoothly; I have a good idea of where I want the story to go, now I just need enough time to get there
-
@Lily-Garden, do you write your stories in order, then? I generally start from the outsides and work in towards the middle for a bit (plus I've got a dramatic middle point this time so I've written that as well), but after that it gets kind of random as the different ideas emerge and then I get all embroiled in revising and rearranging the sections to make the story flow better. Which I think makes it a small miracle that I'm at 23k words now and still going reasonably strong.
@jazzyjeoff, thanks, that makes me feel better about it. I've rewritten it anyway now to make it less similar. As for world-building, I got 5k+ words of background down almost before I started the novel proper so I'm thinking of tidying that up and tacking it on the end as a sort of "mini-fanbook".
-
@Angelus I've decided to write the story in order so that I can make sure all the pieces flow organically into each other and so that the continuity is maintained. I hadn't actually thought about writing it in a different order, but it's something I'll consider and end up running into a wall.
