Quote:
Originally Posted by Chaos2Frozen
Sales is one thing, but it feels like their line-up is pretty much stagnant- They're clearly not all that interested anymore.
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Right now there's really only Yen who publishes light novels. Vertical publishes some novels, but not really anything that would be talked about in this forum. It's a combination of poor sales previously and caution against licensing long series. Light novels target a bad market in NA: manga readers don't want to read a lot of words, and book readers don't want to read manga. Getting a long series like
Shana or
Index might sell well at the beginning, but given how they drop over time, would it be financially justified? Sadly, not a lot of people buy these novels and so it's risky to license things that won't come out around the same time an anime does. They're also much more time-intensive to translate/edit than a normal manga volume. Given the additional factors, it's not surprising the publishers lost interest in pursuing a market that likely doesn't exist.