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Considering how utter poo poo western fans are at actually paying for things due to fan-translation entitlement complexes, I have little hope for this post. In the case of someone reading this and thinking "I'd like to actually support releases in the west in case none of my favorite show is ever produced so I can see how it goes," I'll talk a bit about what Yen Press is doing. In the late 2000s, the manga companies in the US decided to chance translating light novels in addition to manga. Due to the much larger amount of text, novels cost a lot more to translate, thus raising the amount needed to sell in order to get a profit. At that time, there wasn't an audience for novels like Full Metal Panic and Shakugan no Shana, so retailers had to send back a lot of stock and wouldn't buy any more light novels. Thus the companies besides Yen Press decided to halt bringing over any more novels. However, in 2008 Yen licensed two of the more popular novels and have been releasing them since 2009: The Haruhi Suzumiya series (caught up as of 2013), and the Spice and Wolf series (3 more books to go, will finish in 2015). Since then, Yen has gradually added more novels until last year when they unveiled the "Yen On" label for their light novels henceforth. Originally planned to only release 24 novels in 2015 (ie, 24 more than EVERYONE ELSE besides Vertical), they have gone way over that amount as of August. Here's their catalog: Haruhi Suzumiya Spice and Wolf Book Girl Kieli My Girlfriend's a Geek Another (Yen On started) Sword Art Online Accel World A Certain Magical Index Is it Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon Sword Art Online Progressive Kagerou Daze Log Horizon No Game No Life Pandora Hearts Caucus Race The Devil is a Part-Timer The Isolator Durarara!! Black Bullet Strike the Blood (and continuing) Yen has invested a lot of money into LNs lately, so in case you want to see what happens to a story after the advertisement has finished, you may want to support these. Otherwise you're stuck with lovely translations (including mine) that do nothing for the staff who actually produce your favorite story. Again, I have utterly little hope for anyone here or elsewhere in the fandom because we're all entitled, spoiled jerks now, but here's an effortpost anyways.
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Jan 14, 2015 12:49
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HiveCommander posted:Wait, you translate? I used to translate novels (main editor of the fan-translated Haruhi 10/11 novels (my first TL work and ugh, it shows) and sole translator of the Chu2koi novels (some parts I'm proud of)) and staff interviews/background information about shows, mostly KyoAni since I love a lot of their works. The entitlement among fans for free and horrible fan-translations when there's good quality official ones (most of the Accel World TL is absolutely excellent) available has started to irk me, so I'm hesitant to post anymore of my work. Vertical is the only other publisher really doing novels, but a lot of their stuff hasn't been announced, so I only focused on Yen. They're doing more niche stuff, but they also have the AoT novels published as well. I'm not a huge fan of that franchise, so I can't say how good the TLs are. I may do a quick write-up on their stuff later (Yen is fresher in my mind, so most of that was from memory).
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Jan 14, 2015 13:44
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glomkettle posted:Are ebook versions of these available for purchase anywhere? I'd love to support the authors and publishers, but I just don't realistically see myself buying a bunch of physical books. If there are ebooks available I'm not seeing them, which is a shame. In short, Yen's trying to provide digital copies as a way to future-proof things, but the market is still growing and the rights may be too much for such a small market now. Remember that LNs did horrible in the past, so even getting physical copies is an improvement of immense proportions. (and yes, there's the illegal method that gives you a poor translation) Illustrations vary. You typically get 2-3 double-page color illustrations at the start of a book and then anywhere from 4-10 monochrome illustrations after, similar to how manga volumes have the color pages at the start before going monochrome. Shouldn't be much of a loss for kindle, but I've not checked personally (I already bought Haruhi 3x, I'm not buying a 4th copy). HiveCommander posted:I like that they aren't just focusing on the Next Big Thing, some less popular stuff being in their catalog is nice to see. With the Yen On titles, they're trying to hook readers with titles that had/have anime recently as those are the kind who are more likely to impulse buy than of something random like "The Girl Sleeping in the Ocean Bookcase" (new title next month for Dengeki Bunko). Again, it's important to show retailers that you're getting buyers. Most manga/novel sales of these types are still done in physical bookstores, so ordering from Amazon makes little of an impact now. I used to be appreciative of the fan-translations, but the entitlement of fans (especially when Yen picks up a title that was fan-translated) has pushed me against them now just due to the fandom whining about stupid things like "why can't they catch up to the fan-translations faster?!" "why aren't they starting with the newest novel?!". Titles that aren't likely to come over (like FMP/Shana) are fine though.
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Jan 14, 2015 14:29
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HiveCommander posted:Speaking of titles unlikely to come over, I don't suppose you have contacts would be willing to pick up Knights and Magic? Skythewood was looking for someone to hand it over to since he can't find vol2 in Chinese, which has stalled it for a good few months. I don't have many contacts in fan-translating, so that wouldn't be feasible for me. Book Depository has free shipping to Australia, so that's your best option. They carry all of Yen and Vertical's novels, so that's a start.
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Jan 14, 2015 14:55
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