Sol Press Discussion Thread
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I’m down for any new publisher and I like how many LNs we get now! When I started reading them seriously about 2 years I wouldn’t have believed how much the field would open up in such a short time.
I also like how colorful their website is and personally would rather have them start with smaller series in order to get the kinks worked out. I think One Peace would have done well to license something shorter before Shield Hero just to get the translation work up to speed before publishing something bigger.
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@terabyte found the author on Narou, that particular novel was taken down but he was writing other web-novels, then stopped altogether in 2016. His last update was a blogpost about Saikyou Gamer volume 2's release, the last comment it got was from 2017 asking if there would be any info on Volume 3. Of course, there was no answer. I guess the author is missing??
I couldn't find anything about the other novel in Narou. The author is there though, his last update was on January, but it's on a different novel, not Battle Divas.
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@myskaros said in New Challenger Approaches! Sol Press Shines Down with Two LN Licenses:
Their website reminds me of fanlation/scanlation blogs, haha, the way the layout is and their translation progress trackers.
American fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson also maintains a progress tracker for his active projects (in addition to his detailed annual "State of the Sanderson" reports). It works well for him because he is quite a prolific writer with many projects on the go.
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@paulnamida Thanks for the update. What you found certainly doesn't make me want to pick them up any more than before, it would be less if anything lol
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@paulnamida said in New Challenger Approaches! Sol Press Shines Down with Two LN Licenses:
I guess the author is missing?
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That sucks that the original source material is gone too. At least a lot of Syosetu stuff I've been looking at continues passed cancelled series.
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So where will these books be sold? I can't find a listing on Amazon Kindle. Also curious how they will price them.
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The Strongest Gamer video has over a thousand views already.
Edit: Battle Divas up over 1000 views now too.
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I think the current assumption most people are making is that Sol Press intentionally licensed cancelled series because they don't want to take a big risk on an ongoing series that flops, and there aren't many short-but-finished series available to license. Personally, I think this will come back to bite them when all of their initial customers get disappointed that all their launch titles will get cancelled after a few volumes. That said, Sam pointed out that these were winners of Overlap's contest for new authors, so by nature they ought to be fairly self-contained per-volume (since only the first volume would have been entered into the contest).
Personally I think that for their launch lineup, they should have gone for one or two one-shots, and at least one ongoing series. That is, go for some safe oneshots if you want to minimize risk, but take a risk on at least ONE series.
All that said, I like their site, and their video trailers are a lot of fun!
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@terrence It would be nice if J-Novel Club make trailer too! Eespecially SiSKan ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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@lilithr02r1 I need to find someone who can make them for me. Marketing firm that'll work for free light novels?
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I'm bored, so decided to check the trailers again.
Both trailers are at just over 3,000 views (Battle Divas with most now, 3100+). Maybe some news site is giving them traffic because the Diva one was only at 1100 earlier, Strongest Gamer 1700 earlier.
I'm curious OP, how did you find the original news / company website? I just feel like this could have easily been a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear situation for me if I didn't see you post a topic here.
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I met the owner and head editor of Sol Press at Sakura-con and we talked for a while. We decided to host an AMA on the /r/LightNovels subreddit when they were ready to announce the licenses so they contacted me earlier this week to set up the AMA and I knew they were going to make the announcement sometime this week. Hakogami posted the news on /r/LightNovels, but I was also checking their site a couple times a day.
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Well this new challenger hasn’t really done much have they? No word on second volumes for either series yet... If they don’t do something soon I don’t know if they’ll be able to maintain interest (especially since I can’t imagine there’s a ton of people frothing at the mouth waiting for volume 2 of Battle Divas).
What do you guys think, flash in the pan or can they still rise up like a spunky Shonen hero and climb to the top of the LN scene?
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Too early to tell. I think JNC being so quick to develop and having such a fast translation pace has clouded our judgment.
They teased physical releases and just delivered on those in late June I believe, so it's not like they've been completely absent for many months (being vague about the tease initially definitely didn't do them favors, some expecting more licenses or sequel Vols).
If we don't hear anything LN wise through August / September (specifically, announcing work on the volume 2s) I'll be a bit worried. They do have other things going on though (Visual Novel publishing).
From their Twitter account I do remember seeing two things:
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They said they wouldn't have a full floor presence this year at AX, but I believe they said they'd talk to media representatives if anyone contacted them.
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They had some meme marketing message recently to buy more phys volumes (I think last week). I wonder how the phys volumes are doing.
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can they still rise up like a spunky Shonen hero and climb to the top of the LN scene?
Nope. They have shown that they aren't interested in investing a lot of money by entering the industry with 2 LNs they probably got really cheap because they are cancelled by the original publisher - basically stuff Sam said no to. Meanwhile Sam had the licenses for 5-6 series when he launched J-NC.
Now it is possible that they will pick a huge title like Rakudai, but I think if they do, that will be the end of them. What they shown so far is that they aren't competent enough to deal with such long series.
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@terrence said in New Challenger Approaches! Sol Press Shines Down with Two LN Licenses:
Too early to tell. I think JNC being so quick to develop and having such a fast translation pace has clouded our judgment.
Even though JNC is the fastest, other companies have offered more info than Sol. One Peace doesn’t release much but they’ve put out Shield Hero every three months or so. Cross Infinite had more announced early on. Yen hit the ground running despite complaints of taking a while, they launched with at least four titles I can think of and second volumes were cued up for all of those.
Sol feels like a case of biting off more than they can chew and applying a VN model towards LNs that demand a different frequency of release. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t see them being a player in the field for long. Your July/Aug is fair but if they do announce then they’d better have the releases ready in the same or next month rather than 4 months away.
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Yeah, I'd say they won't be a major player, but I could see them still being a small player.
Cross INF is an example of a player in the LN market that started out really slow (I don't know if there was only so much material in Japan until recently, but almost no volume 2s for almost a year iirc; even the amount of unique licenses they had was relatively small at the start, just the first two LNs from May 2016 until May 2017). They also split time with manga releases early on, so they also kind of had an early split business model.
The Sol Press Visual Novels have been delayed a bit by STEAM's approval process, and they've had to do extra QA. I wonder if that's eating into the budget a bit (maybe they were banking on the return from these games too for future investments).
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To be honest, based on what I've read of Sol Press's releases, they do need more quality checks on their translations. There's at least one major issue in the Strongest Gamer light novel where the subject of a sentence is translated completely incorrectly, leading to complete confusion that I only managed to work out because I know Japanese doesn't always bother to mention subject and object in sentences.
This is not even counting the usual typos and errors, such as zeroes in the place of O (for some reason).
So at this point I'm not exactly confident that they'll treat the series they have with a great deal of care.
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Their first Visual Novel has a release date.
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I'm happy to see another Visual Novel localizer but having read the complaints about their light novels I'm concerned about the translation quality.
