[JNC LIGHT NOVEL CONTEST 2025] Round 1 Judging for "Ongoing Series" Category Announced!
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@shiratori-keira To be honest, it can be a really hard pill to swallow. Not getting official feedback on why your novel didn't pass is one thing, but to find out that the reason it might not have made it was solely due to the fact that it wasn't part of the "genre that sells" stings even more. That means no matter how good the writing is or how unique and fresh the story is, the judges will reject it simply because they really don't want to take a chance with it or publish it. The problem many authors outside Japan face is that contests like this are seemingly the only surefire way to increase the odds of their novels getting an anime and/or manga adaptation. And to be honest, knowing that no amount of work or refining will get your work a publishing deal, just makes you want to stop writing.
Hearkening back to a point I made in an above post, isekai/fantasy is heavily preferred by the judges. Taking a look at last year's finalists, it looks like most if not all were of said genres. My ongoing entry was not an isekai or fantasy, it was a sports series. And since there are no other Japanese series out there with a primary focus on said sport, I fear that was what ultimately made the judges pass it over for a more surefire isekai/fantasy seller. With how open the guidelines are in regards to what your novel could be about, I was under the impression that series from a variety of genres would be considered, but it sadly seems that might not be the case.
Thus, my question would be what avenues should we take to try and get a non-isekai/fantasy series published and adapted into an anime/manga?
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@AuthorMN You don't need to tell me. I do understand you way more than you think. That despair you are feeling, I've been feeling it for a decade. After all, I wrote a light novel in 2014, but I couldn't even submit it to a publisher for appreciation. I searched every corner of the internet. Eventually, I just gave up. Only now, a decade later, did I write my second story, and it's thanks to this contest. Neither story is fantasy/isekai.
This is probably the only opportunity that we foreigners have to have our works be seen by a Japanese publisher. So we should at least be grateful that such a contest is being organized. I don't think the judges are only considering fantasy/isekai novels, it's probably that most submissions are in that genre, so the passing ones will reflect that. And of course, given two great works, it is only natural that the one with more potential to become popular is picked.
The tips I can give you are:
- You can dream about it, but you have to understand that having a manga/anime adaption is not a realistic goal
- Write about what you want and love in whatever genre you feel comfortable (and have fun while doing it)
- Even if you force yourself to do a fantasy/isekai, your path will be just as hard (and probably just as hopeless)
- Trends come and go. Now fantasy is all the rage, before it was all about superpower heroes fighting to be the strongest, next year it might be that sport, who knows?
- Even if the judges told you about your weak points and you worked on those, there is no formula to success. You just have to keep trying and always do the best you can
- Always believe in and love your own works
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Since you passed the 1st round, I was wondering if it would be possible to give some insight into what your outline was like. For example, how close were you to the 10,000 word limit? Did you include other notes in it besides just the story outline and character profiles, for example, notes explaining how things like a magic system or tidbits on the geopolitical state of your world? And finally, did you have a concrete ending for the series stated, or was it more of a proposed ending or lack of one. I don't think the judges would have a problem with anyone that passed answering these questions, but if you or any others here that passed, don't feel like answering these questions, I respect that.
@shiratori-keira said in [JNC LIGHT NOVEL CONTEST 2025] Round 1 Judging for "Ongoing Series" Category Announced!:
@AuthorMN You don't need to tell me. I do understand you way more than you think. That despair you are feeling, I've been feeling it for a decade. After all, I wrote a light novel in 2014, but I couldn't even submit it to a publisher for appreciation. I searched every corner of the internet. Eventually, I just gave up. Only now, a decade later, did I write my second story, and it's thanks to this contest. Neither story is fantasy/isekai.
This is probably the only opportunity that we foreigners have to have our works be seen by a Japanese publisher. So we should at least be grateful that such a contest is being organized. I don't think the judges are only considering fantasy/isekai novels, it's probably that most submissions are in that genre, so the passing ones will reflect that. And of course, given two great works, it is only natural that the one with more potential to become popular is picked.
The tips I can give you are:
- You can dream about it, but you have to understand that having a manga/anime adaption is not a realistic goal
- Write about what you want and love in whatever genre you feel comfortable (and have fun while doing it)
- Even if you force yourself to do a fantasy/isekai, your path will be just as hard (and probably just as hopeless)
- Trends come and go. Now fantasy is all the rage, before it was all about superpower heroes fighting to be the strongest, next year it might be that sport, who knows?
- Even if the judges told you about your weak points and you worked on those, there is no formula to success. You just have to keep trying and always do the best you can
- Always believe in and love your own works
While I appreciate the tips, it's sadly stuff I already know. Thus, I want to try and forge my own path to success. I may be dejected right now, which is only worsening thanks to Mario Kart World's $80 price tag (and Donkey Kong Banaza's $70 one), but I'm not giving up on my ongoing series. Thus, I'll ask, care to give it a read? I don't have Discord, but even here, there is an old thread with some old drafts of it in the "Other Discussions" area, not to mention it is being uploaded with new chapters on a webnovel site, but I think it's against the rules to directly link it, so you'd have to find it on your own. Currently, the version up there isn't the version I submitted to the contest, but it is similar at it's core. If you don't want to check it out though, I respect that.
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@AuthorMN said in [JNC LIGHT NOVEL CONTEST 2025] Round 1 Judging for "Ongoing Series" Category Announced!:
Since you passed the 1st round, I was wondering if it would be possible to give some insight into what your outline was like. For example, how close were you to the 10,000 word limit? Did you include other notes in it besides just the story outline and character profiles, for example, notes explaining how things like a magic system or tidbits on the geopolitical state of your world? And finally, did you have a concrete ending for the series stated, or was it more of a proposed ending or lack of one.
Sure, I could share a little bit about that.
My plot outline was 8,094 words and my character profiles were 1,237 words for a grand total of 9,331 words. I started the plot outline with a brief, ~200 word abstract to introduce the core premise behind my story as well as some of the inspiration that led to its creation, with the hopes that it would align and focus the judges on the central goal of the story. After a quick paragraph to summarize where the manuscript had left off with regards to the main characters, their last location, and their current objective, I launched into a high level walkthrough of the main story of my series, arc by arc.
I tried to keep the tone brief and productive—similar to what you might find in a plot synopsis on a wikipedia article for a game or movie—though looking at the plot outline I submitted I was not nearly as abridged as a true wikipedia article would be. To break up the tedium of the back to back paragraphs of exposition, I would occasionally throw in a few lines of dialogue between the characters.
"Something like this, I think. Written in our voice, so you can probably tell who's talking, but without speaker tags or any other embellishments because that would take up space and we have far too much ground to cover."
"That's right. Although it was a bit more hokey than what the actual dialogue in a finished product might look like, these snippets helped to emphasize brief flashes into our character's thoughts and personalities, and captured moments of wit and humor."
"Plus—don't you reckon some things are just plumb easier to introduce by just spittin' it out? Imagine something like... 'Hey guys, aren't we forgettin' about something?' rather than dryly saying 'The party members neglected to think about X'? It's conversational and stuff!"
"Indeed. Far more organic."
...Anyways, things roughly progress like that from plot point to plot point. I slowed down whenever there was a particularly dramatic, funny, or impactful moment I wanted to cover in detail, but otherwise tried to be as light as possible with the explanations so as not to burden the judges. The most important thing for me was to share my vision for the story and connect for them how different developments spill into one plot point after the other in a natural, reader-focused way.
My story does not have much of an elaborate magic system nor great geopolitics, but if they did, I would have only mentioned them when they became relevant to the story and probably no more than a sentence or two per point. To make something contrived up on the spot, something like:
Cauldronville is full of witches who settled in the depths of the woods after being hunted down by the knights of the neighboring kingdom. Johnny decides that he wants to learn how make potions from the elder witch Carla, but is turned down both because of his knightly lineage and also because he doesn't even have any skill slots left with which to learn brewing. He finds and eats a mushroom of forgetting to delete his chivalry skill to demonstrate his resolve to Carla, who begrudgingly accepts him as her newest pupil.
Keep in mind, I should have already done some of the groundwork explaining how things function in the 35k-60k words that preceded this plot outline so anything introduced in the plot outline should nicely slot into the judge's existing knowledge base. I guess you have a slightly harder task ahead of you if you're a truly slow burning series like Bookworm that buries a lot of starting explanations fairly deep into the story, but even still, I would still take this same approach. Paint in passes. Keep it brief.
Generally speaking though, I would feel very hesitant about including separate notes about any aspect of my series that were unmoored from its story or characters—no matter how cool it might be, even in isolation, I would want to clearly show how it fits in and enhances the plot inline. Otherwise it becomes a matter of "Oh okay, cool." that will quickly slip from the judge's mind.
My series does have a concrete ending to the main story where I would be okay with ending things and moving on to writing something else, and so I detailed the ending from the perspective of how I would envision the epilogue chapter would play out, touching briefly on the immediate fates of each of the main characters before ending with a final scene with the immediate fate of the protagonist. While I do have some ideas for how the story could be continued beyond this point, I decided to omit them this time around. With 8k words in the bank, I was worried that I had written far more than enough already, and I also figured that the degree to which my story could be continued would be a natural conversation to have with the folks at JNC should I ultimately find success in the contest and there was no sense in rushing things just to fill the word count. Had I taken up less space and had those ideas been slightly more concrete (I would want something on the level of a <200 word volume blurb like what you see on the series pages rather than the scattered sentences I currently have in my
Sequel Ideas.md), I might have included some of them at the end of the outline in their own section.With regards to the character profiles, if the character was important enough to be named in the plot outline, I included them in the character profile list. Ultimately fourteen characters made the cut. Each character profile was a paragraph or two at most—I gave a brief one sentence introduction to who the character was but beyond that I sorta just said whatever came to mind. I usually tried to summarily call out how the character changes or develops throughout the series (which was particularly useful for characters with more subtle or gradual developments) and included one or more interesting facts or details that wasn't covered directly by the outline, in particular focusing on facts or details that would be extremely difficult to fit into the outline otherwise. Some of the characters even have almost authorial musings like "I thought it would be really fun to write an X character," or "I really like this aspect of their character."
I imagine there are many ways to go about writing these things, but hopefully my anecdotal explanation might give you an idea of how you could go about it in a hypothetical future contest.
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@Hylebos It is very kind of you to share your comments about your novel with other novelists.
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@Hylebos Thank you so much for sharing all this. Thanks to this, I now think I have a better idea on how the judges graded things. For me, I was struggling to get things UNDER the 10,000 word limit. I also started the outline from season 2 of the story, since the manuscript ended with season 1 at just under 60,000 words. From there, I basically did what you did and did an arc by arc walkthrough of the arcs in the story. Since I had Seasons 2-6 already written, I went into great detail on most of them, but lightened up on Season 6 in order to still have room to talk as much as possible about season 7, the current arc of the story, which I consider to be the series' biggest selling point. I did manage to fit in all the key points of season 7, and even some bits of season 8, before listing my proposed ending, as currently, I have plans for far more arcs than were showcased in the outline, heck, I even decided against including some of the side stories, all of which are canon to the main plot, in order to avoid going over the word count.
I feel me not having a concrete ending might not have been appeasing to the judges, but in my defense, this is a series that really could go on for years, since all it takes for new inspiration to hit me is for an IRL tournament to give me some inspiration. Heck, this current arc of the series all came to be because of a real-life tournament, which naturally led to me creating various characters to represent the nations competing in it. And that perfectly segways into my next bit, the characters.
I also felt that if the character was named in the outline, they needed to be given a profile, but I ended up limiting that when it came to certain characters, mainly the ones in Season 7, as at the time of writing the outline, my only vision for some of them was to simply have them be opponents for the main cast. And the worst part is that if I tried to do an outline and character profile page, I'd be completely screwed as with how many characters and plotlines I've got going now, there's no way I'd fit everything in 10,000 or possibly even 20,000. My series actually has over 500 named characters, and while not all of them are major, a good chunk of them are recurring and important to the overall plot, meaning that unless the judges allow for 30,000 words total or at the very least, 10,000 word limits on the outline and character profiles each, there's no way I'll be able to include everything about my story in the next iteration of the contest.
That kind of is a shame, since I do feel my series has to potential to not just bring in a big audience, but also boost the worldwide popularity of the sport it centers around ten-fold, which is another reason I feel that if pitched properly, it could get an anime. That's why I want to know if my main flaws with my entry were more with the writing or the more technical stuff like the outline and/or judges simply not being interested in the genre. Thank you very much for sharing this information once more, and best of luck to you in the contest. And if you ever feel like checking out my work, feel free to. I promise that if you do, you'll be greeted with peak chess.
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@AuthorMN Have you ever considered publishing your novel on the web? There are several excellent sites including the Oraganization for Transformative Works (OTW). On it multiple follow up and alternate Fanlore works abound for AOB on their Archive of Our Own (AOO). If you haven't been on their site please check out them out at www.transformativeworks.org. I'm not sure if they can help you with your eventual publishing goals, but they may act as a future reference on your resume. Best of luck to you.
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@karasutengu I actually publish all my novels on Honeyfeed. That's where I'm frequently uploading my ongoing work.
