YABookgate

[Rezza]

As people have said before, most of all Light Novels currently published today in Japan have roots in webnovels specifically from Narou websites (Narou websites is basically just websites where anyone can submit their stories). What started this was actually Accel World, where after it was published the publisher decided to look at the author's webnovel and decided to publish it as well. That webnovel is Swords Art Online

Now, Narou has a quite a long history in Japan, with them having root starting from ancient phone novels. But with SAO's publishing the game was changed and publishers decided to use the Narou websites as a recruiting pools to pick authors to sign up with. And that is not surprising at all considering manga publishers also did the same using doujinshi (self-publishing) scenes like Comiket and many others as talent filtering pools as well. I think that is the strongest element that Japan, and other Asian countries, have compared to the west: very active amateurs scene

 

[Windows 10 Upgrade]

The what?

Book Fairs are kind of trade conventions/exhibits held by various publishers yearly across the world. As well as spruiking upcoming books, the fairs have another informal by-product where they will all gossip about what books have been acquired by each other and what is likely to sell in the next 24 months.

This ends up being important because 'trends' either start there or become visible there. If Publisher A starts buying books about llamas for big dollars, you can see the llama trend kick off because smaller publishers - without the marketing capital - can still get a bit of a boost by having a llama book ready to go in 24 months. For an author (who is not invited to these things unless part of an exhibit), the book fair can be a metric of their own work in progress - is it going to sell, or has that genre boat sailed?

(Its similar with the Hollywood Twin Films phenomenon I think)

 

[Rezza]

Book Fairs are kind of trade conventions/exhibits held by various publishers yearly across the world. As well as spruiking upcoming books, the fairs have another informal by-product where they will all gossip about what books have been acquired by each other and what is likely to sell in the next 24 months.

This ends up being important because 'trends' either start there or become visible there. If Publisher A starts buying books about llamas for big dollars, you can see the llama trend kick off because smaller publishers - without the marketing capital - can still get a bit of a boost by having a llama book ready to go in 24 months. For an author (who is not invited to these things unless part of an exhibit), the book fair can be a metric of their own work in progress - is it going to sell, or has that genre boat sailed?

(Its similar with the Hollywood Twin Films phenomenon I think)

So what's the gossip from the latest book fairs?

 

[Shaneequa]

So what's the gossip from the latest book fairs?

spill the tea

 

[Dead Lion]

Book Fairs are kind of trade conventions/exhibits held by various publishers yearly across the world. As well as spruiking upcoming books, the fairs have another informal by-product where they will all gossip about what books have been acquired by each other and what is likely to sell in the next 24 months.

This ends up being important because 'trends' either start there or become visible there. If Publisher A starts buying books about llamas for big dollars, you can see the llama trend kick off because smaller publishers - without the marketing capital - can still get a bit of a boost by having a llama book ready to go in 24 months. For an author (who is not invited to these things unless part of an exhibit), the book fair can be a metric of their own work in progress - is it going to sell, or has that genre boat sailed?

(Its similar with the Hollywood Twin Films phenomenon I think)

So it’s literally just a trade show for the publishing industry?

 

[Kari Kamiya]

So it’s literally just a trade show for the publishing industry?

Could've told you that based on the Scholastic Book Fairs schools hold every year.

 

[asceticHedonist]

Could've told you that based on the Scholastic Book Fairs schools hold every year.

I think they're rather different things. I'm 99% certain there were never any industry insiders at my school's Scholastic Book Fair. And the titular "Scholastic" is a single publisher of children's books.

One is a mixer for industry professionals; the other is a sales event for children.

 

[Three Gorillion Dollars]

I need some help understanding the Webnovel scene. The whole thing just makes 0 sense.

I go to webnovel.com or lightnovelworld, and there are stories with millions of views. The top ones have 1.5k - 2k chapters. Two THOUSAND. And some of them still on going. A bit of googling turns up that the top authors actually make okay money with these stories.

Yet, there is 0 cultural footprint of this stuff. No references on social media, no one talking about the stories they've read or making call backs to characters from these stories. Nothing. They don't even have wiki pages.

I can understand if this was the case for some other niche interest. Like, I don't know people sharing knitting patterns. I am not interested in knitting, or anything that would be even slightly related, so I know nothing about the state of the knitting social media. It can be a couple people sharing patterns on facebook, some old Web 1.0 forum that's still chugging along, or there might be some gigantic site that people make livings off of. I don't know, and that's fine.

But I read quite a bit. I read fantasy and sci-fi. I read manga, and even some fanfic. I follow people who talk about geek shit. How is it the case that there is this site with a gigantic collection of people writing millions of words?

4 millions of words. Four millions, and thousands of people giving it five star ratings on these sites. That's the length of the fucking Wheel of Time. Your mom probably hasn't heard of it, but when you talk about it on the web, people know the name at least.

Am I just in a bubble and these stories are actually super popular? Is it all chinese people? A glitch in the matrix that will cause the rest of my life to unravel?

Also, is any of this stuff actually worth reading? Does anyone have any recommendations for a story that would help me understand these people? Are the featured stories actually good? I am pre-judging them pretty harshly but even when I look at the top ranked stories, everything looks dogshit. From the cover art to the names of the stories. I think there is a daily 2k word quota, and I can't imagine good writing coming from that.

I want to understand the state of publishing on the web, but this shit makes 0 sense.

A lot of those sites use bots to juice their numbers (but also, yes, the audience exists on the other side of the world.) If you look at Webtoon's public financials, you can see that many of these sites aren't actually profitable. What is profitable is what some people have mentioned, which is the unique pipeline that the manga industry has in how these stories go from online light novel to cheap manga to cheap anime to cheap merch, and which the Western world is not remotely set up to replicate. What these sites exist to do is trap people with extortionate contracts in the event that any given story does start earning the site money. It is basically IP gambling.

You aren't in a bubble, but there is one going around. During Covid, there was a bit of an investor frenzy into online publishing. Podium received an influx of investor cash, which they used to pay silly advances to people on Royal Road. Naver launched Yonder, their attempt to get this business model into the Western market. Yonder fell apart in months, went on bare minimum life support to suck up what money they could, and will be closed as of the end of July. Naver forced Webtoon to go public because that is how much money they were losing on it, and WBTN stock rapidly fell by 64% because their financial documents basically say, over and over again, "We're never, ever going to make money outside Korea and Japan, and those are peaked out." Podium has drastically scaled back the advances they offer, and the number of authors they offer them to, as well as introducing length limits for not only individual books but overall series. Some publishers like Orbit are quite late to it and are only now getting online-genre imprints off the ground and I can't see any of them doing well. Royal Road is also experiencing issues on this front, and the admins have been looking to get out before the music stops for years now.

In much the same way that The Big Short has Mark Baum realizing there's a bubble because a hooker has five houses and a condo, the extent of the online fiction bubble can be observed by how you have Royal Road writers setting themselves up as "publishing companies" or "literary agents" despite zero experience beyond putting things on Amazon. Unlike the mortgage bubble, though, no one in these communities is smart enough to realize how badly they're getting fucked or how unethical everything is behind the scenes.

 

[Shaneequa]

Could've told you that based on the Scholastic Book Fairs schools hold every year.

Scholastic Book Fairs were the shit. I got a PC Yu-Gi-Oh! game from one of those, once.

 

[inception_state]

Am I just in a bubble and these stories are actually super popular? Is it all chinese people? A glitch in the matrix that will cause the rest of my life to unravel?

Also, is any of this stuff actually worth reading? Does anyone have any recommendations for a story that would help me understand these people? Are the featured stories actually good? I am pre-judging them pretty harshly but even when I look at the top ranked stories, everything looks dogshit. From the cover art to the names of the stories. I think there is a daily 2k word quota, and I can't imagine good writing coming from that.

As others have mentioned already, there is an established web novel -> light novel -> manga -> anime pipeline, so if something has an anime adaption you can assume it's pretty popular (although that isn't necessarily a guarantee of quality). A couple well-known examples of this are Sword Art Online and Mushoku Tensei, but it's a pretty steady process. One getting a lot of hype right now is Lord of the Mysteries, which has an anime adaption coming out this summer (I guess technically donghua since it's Chinese, but whatever). I gave the webnovel a shot and it has some neat ideas and worldbuilding, but I can see why it has not really caught on that much in the west. I'm not sure if this was a translation issue or just the style for Chinese web novels, but the prose isn't up to the standard you would expect even for decent RR self-published works, and the pacing is definitely on the slow side.

The combination of poor to mediocre translations and mediocre original writing really kills a lot of interest in the west, outside of a handful of popular web novels that have cult followings like LotM and Reverend Insanity. It's like if some Chinese people were making fan translations of fiction published on RoyalRoad - how many stories would really catch on past the translation and cultural barrier?

 

[Rezza]

Funny you mentioned manga
There was a research that said that a manga adaptation of a light novel actually sold 2-3 times more than the original, and some are more profitable than the light novel. I wonder if the same thing can be replicated elsewhere like in the US considering the amount of manga and comic young people buy and read these days

 

[Alexander Thaut]

Funny you mentioned manga
There was a research that said that a manga adaptation of a light novel actually sold 2-3 times more than the original, and some are more profitable than the light novel. I wonder if the same thing can be replicated elsewhere like in the US considering the amount of manga and comic young people buy and read these days

there's been comics adaptations of YA books before, and of other "popular" books/genre fiction.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Funny you mentioned manga
There was a research that said that a manga adaptation of a light novel actually sold 2-3 times more than the original, and some are more profitable than the light novel.

Because light novels take longer to translate than manga, and manga is 99% drawings, so your average teenager prefers that to actual reading. And not everyone can read at the speed of light, so in a way, it takes longer to get through a single light novel volume than a manga volume.

Been slowly getting into light novels myself, but I honestly prefer holding a physical book in that regard.

 

[Dead Lion]

Because light novels take longer to translate than manga, and manga is 99% drawings, so your average teenager prefers that to actual reading. And not everyone can read at the speed of light, so in a way, it takes longer to get through a single light novel volume than a manga volume.

Been slowly getting into light novels myself, but I honestly prefer holding a physical book in that regard.

I can’t find any data to support this but i would also hazard to guess that Manga is way bigger in Japan than western comic books in the west.

Here comic books are relatively niche, there a franchise can get big even without a decent Anime adaptation. Jojo’s and Berserk come to mind.

There’s also the fact that while LN’s sell decently in Japan among western weebs they aren’t popular at all. I’ve read multiple light novels but never held one physically because they’re niche enough to just not come to Poland, at all. While I can get manga pretty easily mind you.

 

[JJLiautaud]

I can’t find any data to support this but i would also hazard to guess that Manga is way bigger in Japan than western comic books in the west.

Before they stopped releasing monthly sales numbers Manga was bigger in America than traditional comic books.

 

[asceticHedonist]

I can’t find any data to support this but i would also hazard to guess that Manga is way bigger in Japan than western comic books in the west.

That's one of this loser's favorite talking points when he's in the part of his monthly cycle in which he praises Japanese media and doesn't try to hide the fact that he's a weeb.

If he seems down on manga/anime at any given moment, give it a couple weeks, and he'll be telling his webcam that the American comic book industry should learn from Japan.

 

[Rezza]

So IG reels showed me a YA series called Sky's End. Is it any good?

 

[Three Gorillion Dollars]

Exiled to live as a Low under the merciless rule of the Meritocracy, sixteen-year-old Conrad refuses to become heir to his murderous uncle. But when behemoth sky serpents attack the floating island of Holmstead and devour Conrad's ailing mother, Conrad cuts a deal to save the only family he has left. To rescue his sister from his uncle's clutches, Conrad must enter the Selection of the Twelve Trades.

Freshly recruited into Hunter, the deadliest of all the Trades, Conrad endures rigorous training, manipulative peers, and the Gauntlet-a brutal final challenge that pits Conrad's skyship crew against the very terrors that orphaned him. As Conrad competes in the lowest of stations, he overhears whispers of rebellion in the dark. Conrad had never known anything existed below the toxic black clouds of the Skylands . . . until now.

Mmmm, I'm going to say, no.

 

[asceticHedonist]

Mmmm, I'm going to say, no.

Hunger Games? Is that you?

 

[Rezza]

Mmmm, I'm going to say, no.

Ah, gotcha
I was just surprised the author's a straight white dude, with an actually good book cover