Originally Posted by Tiamat's Disciple
Never happen. Bookshelf space is at a premium and no book store will give up space to LN's when they can add more normal stock that will sell quicker and thus garner more profit. Also, there aren't enough ongoing LN's to justify the space. Sure if you look at the whole, there are a good number of titles out there, but most of those have been cancelled by their publishers. My local store now only carries completed or near complete series that sell. They'll order any other, but wont carry it. They got fed up of having active titles being dropped and bearing the brunt of the fanbase anger
Dosen't work like that though. Viz tried doing that and it didn't work, in fact it was a total failure.
Not going to happen really. Yen are taking a gamble on Haruhi, one i sadly don't expect to really succeed. Though they have the advantage of being a little known (yet) publisher.
The underlying issues need to be resolved before LN's can ever be sucessful.
1) They need their own department. People may be interested by the title, but for a lot of people as soon as they see Viz or Tokyopop on the spine,, they discount it immediatly. To counter that they need to set up a new branch, give it a different name, and have it only do light novels.
That's something Yen Press have taken to heart by giving all their LN's to Little Brown, so there's a definte space between manga and LN. Also because it's coming from a book publisher, and not a manga publisher, it'll go in the normal book shelves much as any other new novel will (confirmed that on the ground with my local stores).
2) Don't license and then never release. This was the biggest mistake that SSE ever did, they acquired numerous titles that would have sold, but never released them. If you license something, release it.
3) Promote Promote Promote and Promote some more. Get the word out, get sample chapters out (Again something Yen Press did), make them a big thing and make sure everyone knows you have a new series coming out. Get involved with the chain stores so as they have promo/launch events. People can't buy if they don't know it's out.
4) Don't release one or two volumes then kill the series. This is something both SSE and TP did, frequently. This has a severe knock on effect of people not buying any series, even if they love the series, for fear it'll get canceled and thus wasted their money.
5) You need to give a series a chance to breath. If a series is only a few volumes long, instead of focusing on how much money it'll make you, look at using it as a launching pad. Show off the quality and effort gone into it. Many people will go for a short series first before taking on a longer one. If they're impressed quality wise they're more likely to come back for others.
6) Be prepared to loose money. LN's have a smaller market share at the moment than manga. they're a long way from being a profit earner. You have to be prepared to lose money in the short term as you build up a following. Things are going to be harsh in the short to mid term, but if you put out quality consistently, and fairly fast, people will buy.
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