J-Novel Club has been established for over 3 years now, and the company has grown a lot since its debut in 2016. From releasing light novels digitally, to converting a number of their titles from digital to print and to their first successful Kickstarter, it’s clear that fans of light novels are into what J-Novel Club is doing. And while I was at Anime NYC this year, I talked to the person who started the company, Sam Pinansky, to discuss a bit about their success and almost everything they announced at their panel on Saturday.

TheOASG: J-Novel Club’s been around for over 3 years now — can you share a couple titles you’ve published since starting that have done well, and a couple titles that you thought would do a little bit better but haven’t?

Sam Pinansky: Our best selling title was — and we knew it’d do well, but we didn’t necessarily know it’d do this well, was How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom. It didn’t have an anime, didn’t have a manga adaptation, it’s just a series that really clicked with our readers because of the realist attitude of our main character and of course it’s also got a bunch of cute girls, but it’s not as silly as some of the other harem series out there. It really has a great combination of romance and comedy and world building, and that is what our audience really wants.

As for some titles or a series of titles that have done maybe not as well? I think the most talked about examples of that are our horror novels. Those have really not performed well at all. Anything that’s a little bit too horror seems to not be what our audience wants to read right now. I know there’s an audience for Japanese horror but it’s not our audience right now.

What were the expectations for the Rokujouma!? Kickstarter?

Well our expectations were what we set the goal at. For obvious reasons the Rokujouma!? Kickstarter is a very special, unique kind of thing — the fandom that series has has been stable and very tightly knit for like almost a decade. The series actually had its 10th anniversary earlier this year, and the fandom in the West has been around for almost as long. So it’s a great series to do a Kickstarter for because it has that core base of super fans.

As for our actual expectations, it honestly just came down to how large was this base of fans and how willing were they to put down the money to collect a set of 10 volumes. $250 dollars is the base pledge for getting all the books and that’s not a small amount of money. So what really went beyond my expectations was just how many of those core fans were able to and willing to pay for all the physical books like that. It was very heartening, and to see that there were over 700 people that pledged for the Kickstarter is beyond our expectations, I was thinking more 300, 350.

The fact that this first Kickstarter was successful, where do you think this will lead J-Novel Club moving forward?

That’s a very good question. To say that this is something that we can easily apply to other series is sort of naive. Rokujouma!? has just this super long-term core fanbase that’s been around for forever and it’s a series where the length in of itself just made practical, normal physical publishing completely unworkable.

On the other hand, if it’s another series that we’re doing an e-book of right now that’s selling well enough and has a good enough fanbase we’ll just do that in print with traditional ways.

So I feel like it has to be something special, there has to be something unique about it that makes it appropriate for crowdfunding and then we’d consider it. Obviously we learned a lot about just the mechanics of crowdfunding, how to run a kickstarter, structuring the pledges, the kinds of questions people ask. So if we do another kickstarter in the future it would be something that would be easier for us.

However, we’re not done yet. The money might have deposited to our account — it actually hasn’t yet — the money might be there but haven’t actually finished the fulfillment. It’s going to be a month-long process as we print them, get all the rewards created, so to say that we have experience with Kickstarter is only saying “We have experience with the first half now” and I think we’re going to learn even more as we go on in the next couple months.

How would you sum up the state of light novels in the West today, and where you believe it’s going in the future?

The state of light novels in the West is great. We’ve seen growth after growth every year in sales — this year is going to be another record from last year and it’s not because we’re publishing more books, but we’re selling more copies of every book that we’ve already published. I think the number of light novels being published every year, from us to our competitors are growing month to month. I think the number of people that are reading light novels and are interested in LN are also growing as people who are already fans of it are telling their friends and using their social media and talking about the series. The growth is phenomenal and has been growing continuously.

I think that, for J-Novel Club ourselves, we’ve grown exponentially over the past two years, and to continue to do that kind of pace of growth would be folly, but we’re going to continue to expand the types of books we do and the number of books we do over the next two years.

How’s your time in Anime NYC been?

This is my first time at Anime NYC and this con has grown incredibly huge in an incredibly short amount of time. Thankfully it’s being run by some real veterans who actually know what they’re doing. I know there’s a lot of anime cons out there that wouldn’t have been able to handle this kind of growth at this kind of pace but they seem to have done a pretty good job. The venue can definitely handle this many people, which is also very good.

I think there’s still a lot that they need to tweak as the years go forward but they have the fundamentals down to become — I mean they’re already, the attendance numbers I’m hearing this year are going to put them in the top echelon of cons in the United States. They could come close to dethroning #1 and #2 very shortly if they know what they’re doing. If they keep getting the guest list that they got this year and they keep being well-organized for vendors like us and industry…the one complaint I have is that they really need to get an industry lounge. Because I need somewhere to get a good internet connection for me to do work and so does my staff and the booth ain’t cutting it. *laughs*

So Peter [Tatara], you hear me? Get an industry lounge next year!

You guys had a lot of announcements at your panel yesterday. Let’s first start with the Legend novels and what it’s all about.

The Legend novels is an imprint for Kodansha in Japan, and actually I don’t happen to know why they started it in Japan. It’s a new light novel publishing label in Kodansha. Some people might wonder, “Well doesn’t Kodansha already have a light novel line?” Like Kodansha Ranobe Bunko that they’ve been publishing — for example How Not to Summon a Demon Lord is one of those books from Kodansha. What’s interesting is that this light novel line was started not by the manga line of Kodansha but by the literature side. So the editorial staff for Legend novels in Kodansha and their bosses, their experience is more “real literature” and they thought that light novels and the people reading them in Japan, the demographics, are actually younger than you might think. They’re really often teenagers in high school or somewhat in college, but then after college it drops off. However, with people and light novel fans growing up and people reading web novels from a wider wider range, there’s a lot of web novels out there that are actually geared toward slightly older demographics. Like people just starting their lives in society and going to and commuting from work, and those people want to read these types of novels too, but they’re a little embarrassed to be sitting on the train and reading High School DxD.

What Legend novels is trying to tap into is that audience that wants to read something a little bit more mature but still wants something that’s basically a light novel, fun, maybe has some video game mechanics, isekai, the same type of fun stuff that people like about most light novels but maybe aim for a higher target of demographic and that’s what they started publishing.

So when I saw this line of books that they were coming out with I was like “Ooh, these are some titles that are going to attract our audience. Our audience is going to want to read them and then once they try it out they’re gonna be like ‘these are amazing! These are awesome!’” and I really think that’s gonna happen. If you read some of the samples that are up on our website you’ll see these novels take risks in ways that our other light novels don’t, from how they’re written, the voices, the types of characters they have. One of them has this old retired guy and another one is a livestreamer on Twitch *laughs* There’s real interesting stuff in these novels that you wouldn’t get in other types of light novels.

I presume you’ve gotten requests to start a shoujo label, so can you share when plans for J-Novel Heart got started?

Well, to say the idea of starting another label called J-Novel Heart was actually something that I had before I started the company. When I decided the original name of the company J-Novel Club I actually thought about how, “Well, eventually we could be four separate labels — J-Novel Club, J-Novel Heart, J-Novel Diamond and J-Novel Spade.

Oh?

I will leave it up to your imagination on what J-Novel Diamond and Spade would be if we do decide to add two more labels.

But J-Novel Heart was designated to always be a shoujo and romance oriented novel set that would appeal to women. When I really started to work on this for real was about six months ago. That’s when I started planning, doing the research, figuring out which publishers I could approach, who I could get licenses from, what their catalogs were and how I could approach them for licenses and how many books we would start out with and the translation pace. It takes a long time — like a lot of these publishers like Arian Rose, from Frontier Works, and Pash! Books — they’re completely new to us. So I had to approach them, explain to them who we were, why we were actually trying to license these books as no one else has really tried to license from them before. So it’s been a learning process over a number of months.

My reasoning for this and why I’m starting this label is not because I think it’s actually going to sell very well right now. The numbers I have from our demographics and other information is that is the light novel reading audience right now is about 70-30 male to female. It’s similar to the anime audience from the numbers I’ve heard. On the other hand the manga reading audience is much closer to 50-50, and if you’re talking about shoujo manga in particular there’s a very large number of readers there. So there’s obviously potential for a much more balanced readership in the light novelsphere, and I’m a believer in if you publish it they will come.

So I think what really was necessary is for one of the publishers like us to take the risk, to jump off and jump into shoujo novels, or otomege novels, and just start publishing them. And once we do, at first the sales might not be where we’d like them to be but over a period of time they’re going to grow and grow as we attract more of the shoujo manga fans, but then also hopefully we’ll attract some romance novels fans who like to buy e-book romance novels but are just going to look at the art on the covers of our books and be like, “Oh my god! I have to read this now! Look at the frills! The frills!”

So how successful was Sexiled and Bakarina digitally, since you’ll be bringing both to print in 2020?

Well Sexiled has been a huge hit, there’s no question about it. It sold a ton of books very quickly and got a lot of buzz for good reasons, for bad reasons, but it’s a fun title and it’s super unique — there’s no other light novel like that that’s been written that’s so much a light novel but also so much from a very specific female perspective. I think that it appeals to everyone who, if you enjoy fantasy and overpowered light novels but if you’re also are often just getting sick and tired of it always being the guy this is definitely the book for you.

As for Bakarina, that one has always sold strongly and that’s because it’s just pure comedy, it’s hilarious. Comedy is universal, everyone loves to read about that kind of thing. So it’s not — even within Japan it’s readership is mixed between male and female. It’s published in a girls novel line in Japan, but it also has pretty universal appeal. And the fact that we’re doing it in print is because sales have been strong and also of course the anime is coming out in the spring. We want to make sure when that comes out we have both print and digital out there for people.

Finally, how’s the work going for the hardcover editions of Full Metal Panic and Crest of the Stars?

Well Full Metal Panic is nearly manufactured– *goes and grabs the covers* We have the actual covers for Full Metal Panic right here. These are failed prototypes–

Ahhh – (Yes I tried to ask for a picture of these, but was politely turned down because they were prototypes – Justin)

So we’re working right now on making sure they’re really nice and good for everybody, but unfortunately the foil stamping that we’re using hasn’t been up to the quality I like. It’s too much smearing on this one, you can see the E *points to the title* is filled in kinda, it’s not been stamped properly and this one *shows second prototype* is too flaky, it flakes off a little bit too much. This first one is close but it also has problems like the second one, so we’re trying to get it to a happy medium and maybe try and find a different substrate.

But the translation, editing and layout is done for both of them actually, we’re in final proof checks for that. The interior is totally finalized, we’re just trying to get the cover manufactured correctly. That’s why we had to delay Full Metal Panic an extra month, but it is our first hardcover so we’re just trying to do the best job we can to get a real high quality product to everybody.