Was there any JNC's coin sale at all?
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Wanting to get back into some JNC series I've put on hold so I may need more coins soon. I used to stock up credits during black friday, but ever since we got converted to coins, I don't think I've ever seen any discount apart from the regular member/premium ones. So I'd like to ask the regular here if anything I've missed that maybe I should wait for?
Did my prediction sadly come true? 😭
@hyper said in New J-Novel Coins are here!:Now, on the sale topic. My speculation is that there will no longer be any extra sale for coins on top of premium/member discount. Instead, we will have subsets of books/series on sale in rotation. In other words, there will be no way to buy cheaper coins, but occasionally we can buy books will less coins. If that is true, I'll be disappointed to be honest. In the old system I can (and happily) buy a whole lot of credits on sale and can be confident that I'll get the best deal for any future books I want on release. Now I will have to wait for sale if I want the best deal, which will make me be more reluctant to get the books day one. I hope I'm wrong.
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So far there have been no sales of any kind.
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@Geezer-Weasalopes Sad. Thanks for the info!
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@hyper There also hadn't been sales for over a year before that change, so it's not necessarily the result of the switch. Potentially they'd already decided no more sales and so looked at other ways of changing their currency.
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You need to bear in mind that sales of that type aren't economically viable in the long run unless the base price of their product is such that they still turn a profit after the discount.
JNC's base price is lower than the base price charged by a number of the other publishers of translated LNs and manga; I just scrolled through Kobo and could tell at a glance which were the JNC titles by the lower price. -
@GeorgeMTO Probably not direct causation but at the time of my prediction I think it was a clear indication that we won't get any more sale. Still, sad. 😭
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There's another side to the change to coins leading to a lack of discounts.
Before the change to coins, JNC could only ever mark down their entire catalog, all at once or have no sale at all. Furthermore, since book credits could be stored, we could buy future books on sale.
In that environment, it hardly made sense to buy credits at any time when they weren't on sale. That sort of sale is lose/lose - customers lose because we don't have the flexibility to buy credits except for a couple weeks out of the year, and JNC loses because they have to budget under the assumption that most customers will only ever pay the "on sale" price for anything.
Now that they've changed to coins, with the possibility for different books to cost different amounts, there's now also the possibility for the same book to cost different amounts at different times. This would JNC run more targeted sales, marking down some of the catalog and not others, to breathe some life into volumes that have already passed their initial peak.
It's been a while since the change to coins, and we haven't seen any sales like that, though. I would guess that they're still working on the infrastructure needed to run them, but I don't really know.
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@rsog412
Mentioning infrastructure seems relevant in a great many ways.
I've no idea how long in advance they were working on Nina, but that's impacted things due to setting up that infrastructure. I'd not be surprised that it was at least several years in the making.
It may also have had something to do with the switch to coins, but maybe not.
Even if they'd considered setting things up for a sale, they might not have had the staff time to allocate to it given everything else going on just now.All your libraries are belong to us. | Aub Rozemyne | Those who do not read shall not eat.
Help me, Satomi-san. You're my only hope. | Fight! Yurika! | WW[R|S]D
Croquettes, Baguettes, and Books, oh my! -
I wonder if this relates at least in part to the legal perils created by international trade such as the French fixed ebook pricing law, but then again one would assume that would also apply to the premium member discount.
I wouldn't be surprised if the answer was just that they decided that having occasional sales discouraged people from buying stuff the rest of the time, although if that were the reason then it would have made sense for them to announce that they had no plans for sales.
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@Geezer-Weasalopes said in Was there any JNC's coin sale at all?:
@rsog412
Mentioning infrastructure seems relevant in a great many ways.
I've no idea how long in advance they were working on Nina, but that's impacted things due to setting up that infrastructure. I'd not be surprised that it was at least several years in the making.
It may also have had something to do with the switch to coins, but maybe not.
Even if they'd considered setting things up for a sale, they might not have had the staff time to allocate to it given everything else going on just now.Given how long systems like that take, it was probably first brought up as a serious proposal in 2019 or 2020, with most of the systems work happening over 2022 and 2023.
@Shiny said in Was there any JNC's coin sale at all?:
I wonder if this relates at least in part to the legal perils created by international trade such as the French fixed ebook pricing law, but then again one would assume that would also apply to the premium member discount.
Doesn't it apply? That was what it sounded like Sam was saying when announcing it...
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When it comes to sales, this year there were many reasons why there wasn't one.
One reason, frankly speaking, is that no one had any spare time to deal with planning or arranging it.
We have a relatively new person handling Japanese publisher communication and they are just getting caught up with licensing backlog, and they would be key for getting any book-level discounts approved.
Generic coin discount sales are not-necessarily good business decisions because data we have show that mostly super-core users take advantage of it, and those people don't buy any more books than they usually would. In fact if anything it discourages them from buying books in hope of a future coin sale coming.
Lastly, after acquisition from Kadokawa, JNC is no longer doing cash-based accounting, and has no fundamental issues with cash flow, so having a year-end black friday sale to bump up revenue won't actually do anything for our bottom line unless people actually buy books immediately with those coins (which, our data shows, they don't. They hoard them. And hoarded coins aren't revenue, they are actually technically liabilities).
So in other words, to do sales in the future we really need to do sales on specific books/series, and those take a lot more planning and work and approvals which the staff isn't able to handle, especially during holiday season when so many people are taking vacations.
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Thank you for giving us some insight into the logistics and business decisions. Posts like this are part of what makes J-Novel Club so cool and interesting. I like to understand the reasoning why, rather than wonder.
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I do feel offering a 100 coin discount for the first volume or two (depending on how long running the series is) of all series currently on catch up would be a good idea. It would encourage people to buy what they’re already dry reading for free and also allow you to pick up the first volume of a series you didn’t have time to get to. Outside of the back end time it would take to set something like this up I don’t see a downside.
