Japan's Monthly Manga and Light Novel Rankings for September

Anonymousmon said:
Does kimi no nawa LN story is the same as the movie?

kuuderes_shadow said:


Shousetsu Kimi no Na wa., yes. Kimi no Na wa. ANOTHER SIDE:EARTHBOUND, no.

Comic_Sans said:
Yaoi anime adaptation by DEEN when?

crx07 said:
Re:Zero vol. 9 is pretty high given its release date September 23.
Kimi no Na Wa sales is crazy. Also mahouka sales are high.

Tenryuu1 said:
Oh, god... When the fu** they'll finally Spice & Wolf S3-adaptation give us, it has been damn it long ago since at that time!!! Source materials are more than enough for (meanwhile even for few additionally seasons), there is already a spin-off LN series...

Comic_Sans said:
Yaoi anime adaptation by DEEN when?

ultravigo said:
Whitefox i'm still waiting for the devil is a part timer s2.

Botato said:
World Trigger in top 10 is good, though wish it could sell ~400k in one month.

hpulley said:
Now that there's a spinoff, I'd say there is a chance. You're right that there is enough material for a third season. In fact there is enough material for another four seasons... it's unlikely we'll get that but getting another season to promote the spinoff material is quite possible. The other option of course is to wait until more of the spinoff novels are done and make an anime for that instead. Only the publisher knows what they want to do there. Either way, I'd love to see more of either the original or the spinoff get adapted into anime.

laCloud said:


I'm just glad it sells so well and against a number of other popular shounen series, hopefully when enough manga material exists we'll get a S2 with a better budget for animation

Tenryuu1 said:


Yeah, because I did hoped that they at 10th anniversary event of S&W (what in this years was...) finally the 3rd season announce would, but lol... Again a needless teasing of them...>_> Dunno on what they still waiting, every requirements for a 3rd season are already given, but they won't nevertheless us give... - Even the japanese fans are damn it angry for since few years meanwhile!

hpulley said:
With just 1 more novel announced I didn't expect more anime. The spinoff novel made me interested but it is actually fairly rare for the original series to get more anime to promote the new series. It has been done, but not often. It is more common for the spinoff to get its own anime as it more directly promotes the spinoff.

Unfortunately it is well known that LN and manga adaptations only rarely adapt the entire work though recently there have been several cases of it happening so I think the chances are higher now than they were for S&W years ago. So perhaps it isn't true anymore that they never finish the adaptations; I certainly hope we see more complete works being animated.

Tenryuu1 said:


Ehmm... I'd be mad, if they the spin-off suddenly adapt would, because they would pretty much skip (Season 2 is just on the most interesting place ended, in the LN begins from there best part..., and if they this at the adaptation skip would...)...


And I'd not say that it for manga's rare is that they a full adaptation get - especially at Shounen Jump-titles... Really, the popularity level between the both mediums (LN and manga) is more or less the same, but nevertheless will the manga favorized in the adaptation area. Like already mentioned before: Shounen Jump-title manga series like Naruto, Dragon Ball, One Piece, etc. they getting their 10~20 seasons (what hundred of eps. means), but LN's only usualy max. 3 seasons... About fairness can't more speak...

umashikaneko said:


Popularity of manga and LN as medium are significantly different.Most people grown up with reading manga in Japan while LN is rather queer hobby for nerds.

ixaa said:

Never, hopefully.
Ten Count started off great but then all I remember in the later chapters are a bunch of rape scenes.

Rio_Pascua said:


It's not rape scenes, though. That was mutual, past chapter 25.

Still, I really hope Ten Count gets a proper anime, uncensored and fully adapted. They already fucked up Finder's "anime" with that animix, another series with great smut that would have a really good series cause it has continuous plot. Well, at least they are doing Super Lovers justice and it seems that S2 would follow-up on the innuendos actually.

hpulley said:
Which you can see above. Aside from the odd outlier like Kimi no Na Wa, on average the best selling manga outsell the best selling light novels by a factor of 5-20x. The price is similar so it often makes me wonder as LN authors either get a higher percentage or are paid less than mangaka. It is simply easier to read manga, it is a much more accessible medium than light novels.

ixaa said:

lol how can it not be rape when one of them was literally saying "stop, stop" the whole entire scene
though this isn't a conversation to be had on this type of thread

kuuderes_shadow said:


Almost certainly paid less, but then remember that most mangaka have several assistants that they have to employ, whereas novel writers don't. Also the cost of physically producing a novel is lower than the cost for a manga, so there is more money coming in from each sale even if the two products are sold at the same price.

hpulley said:

I still wonder how the 5K/volume Oricon sales level LN authors get by. At that level I assume they also work another job full or part time to make ends meet.

kuuderes_shadow said:


I think the 5k level ones would get by fine, unless they get paid far less per sale than western authors.

You have to remember:
- Oricon sales don't report for all retailers.
- They don't include e-books at all, which make up a significant portion of light novel sales.
- The sales we see reported for a 5k seller would almost invariably only be the first week sales. Which would only be a small proportion of their eventual sales. Unfortunately we don't tend to see reranks of things that are flat sellers at around the 5k mark.
But flat sellers that rerank when an anime starts airing commonly show sales of about 2.5x the sales that new volumes get, which would indicate that this 5k seller is actually selling about 12.5k*. By Oricon standards. At a guess that could be about 30k in total? If you're releasing 4 books a year that would come to 120k books a year. Ignoring any additional royalties, advances and so forth, and assuming about 30-40 yen per book sold then that's 3.6-4.8 million yen per year which is more than enough to live on. Even if you cut a slice out of that for the illustrator.

On the other hand, selling 5k on the Oricon rankings means you're selling more than most light novels do...

... But then again low pay for writing is the norm everywhere.

*perhaps a bit less as this ignores the miniscule boost that comes from the attention a series garners from simple fact that a series is about to get an anime.

EDIT: lowered the yen/book rate to more accurately correlate to the book prices.

hpulley said:
Yeah, if the Oricon figures were only 10-20% of actual sales then you could get by alright as a 5K Oricon reported author. If not, then only the 30K+ sellers would be able to make a good living by writing alone.

Anime adaptations don't give the author much more money unless the book sales go up too. Just the manuscript fee and royalties don't actually amount to much (which I know directly from asking some of them, the royalties end up about the same per disc as per book sold as the percentage for them is very small). Thus a manga/novel boost is worth way more to them.

bigivelfhq said:

Don't most light novel are first released in a magazine anthology like manga?

Book royalties sales is around 10-15% of the actual sales(by sales means the books that aren't returned, if a library keeps the book in the shelves, the author receives that money).

I believe that Oricon reports at least 70-80% of sales(major retailers), just 10-20% is obviously not what it is reported(unless light novel reports are way worse than Manga and Disk reports).

How much does each volume of light novel costs? Around double of a manga right? around 640 yen.

umashikaneko said:
Popularity of manga and LN as medium are significantly different.Most people grown up with reading manga in Japan while LN is rather queer hobby for nerds.

kuuderes_shadow said:


Very very few are. Some magazines contain side stories or teasers but other than Fujimi Dragon Book and a few Fujimi Fantasia Bunko titles that are serialised in Dragon Magazine, and to a lesser extent series published in Shueisha's Cobalt magazine, it's become almost unheard of for a series to be released like that (and has been for a while now as well).



Is a typical range for novels, EXCLUDING the portion taken by the retailer and distributor.


As I previously stated, ebooks are not included in Oricon's sales figures and make up a large proportion of light novel sales. Also, light novels have slightly better long tails than manga and far better than anime discs do. For mega-hits we see those long tails, like we do if a series reranks for whatever reason. For lower sellers we don't. Oricon may report from most major stores, but the lists we get don't include most sales, and the lower selling the series is the lower the proportion of sales that we see.



Would be on the higher end. About 600 yen would be typical. Take about a third of that off for distributor/retailer share (usually slightly higher than this but it's an easy figure to work with) and then take 10% of that gives 40 yen per book. I don't know if the illustrator's pay comes from the same share of the pie as the author's - if it does it would reduce the figure.

Yaoi-Senpai said:
OMG JUST LOOK AT THE SALES OF TEN COUNT!! MORE THAN I EXPECTED!$ AWESOME!!

Tenryuu1 said:


Eee... Well, I did "more or less" said, and you're saying if LN's (or under their original term description: shousetsu) a modern medium is, like the smartphones and etc. Lol, shousetsu's does give/exist in Japan along with manga's since centuries...

But let's be honest, I did the selling charts of manga's and LN's on different forums/sources checked: There you can quiet see, that the selling at the both mediums more or less the same are, at all both parties you see titles, where some successfully selling and some badly. What I wanna with this say, is, that LN's will always less favorized for a full adaptations, even if they having the required source materials for and the perfect selling results, like at S&W, Horizon and Highschool DxD. - E.g. Horizon: Horizon sells pretty, like their merchandise (from stickers to PVC figures and etc.), and they're currently on vol. 9 - the both seasons was with the first two vols adapted, they had then quiet at least season 3 and 4 adapted meanwhile... But instead that this LN series also his/her chances gets in the anime area, getting the Shounen-title manga's in row their adaptations...>_>

@hpulley