Have you noticed that recently anime titles have gotten,
well, wordier…?
Like; "Is it Wrong to Pick up Girls in a Dungeon?"
Maybe you’ve also seen
"Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall in Love with a Pervert,
as Long as She's a Cutie?"
or "Do You Love Your Mom And Her
Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks??"
and my personal favorite
"If I Don't Successfully Pick Up 420 Girls,
I Am Going To Die In A Lot Of Different Ways"
Nice title!
So what in tarnation is even going on here?
Was there a secret character limit on anime titles
that just got upped and now everyone is
making long titles just for the heck of it?
Maybe.
But what all these anime mouthfuls have in common
is they all started off as light novels.
What are light novels?
Probably about 8oz….
Sorry that was just a little dad joke for yall.
First off you know that their books,
it’s right there in the title,
and you probably know they come from Japan.
You might even know that they have
something to do with anime.
But to get to the truth we must dive
deep into the exciting world of
international publishing- wait what?
In Japan light novels are called 
"raito noberu", or "ranobe".
"Raito noberu" is literally just how
a Japanese speaker
would say the English words “light novel”.
This is an example of wasei-eigo,
or “Japanese-made English”,
where English or other loan words
are given new meaning in Japanese.
Fun fact: The term anime itself is a wasei-eigo
of the English word animation.
Light novels usually include manga style
illustrations or even panels,
most often printed in black and white
at the beginnings of chapters
and when new characters or locations are introduced.
These are usually full page illustrations,
sometimes with panels and sound effects,
And they tend to be short, hence the term "light novel".
Many clock in at 300ish pages, around
the same length as a western novella.
They use more familiar kanji and often employ furigana,
the small Japanese characters that hang
around the kanji to help with pronunciation.
Light novels are usually bunkobon or A6 size
and if you're North American that
means absolutely nothing to you.
Yes, there is an international standard for paper sizes
and you would know that if North America used it
but yall don't because…
W-why don’t y'all use that…?
For context, the collected manga volumes you read
while sitting on the floor of the Barnes and Noble
are tankobon size, or B6 size.
Most mass market paperbacks in
Japan are bunkobon size.
Think of them as the Japanese version
of the airport novel.
The closest we have this system can
be seen in a comic book store,
with manga mostly in one size, western 
superhero comics in another size,
European comics another, and indie comics are,
well, whatever format you want.
The best way to tell if what you’re
reading is a light novel
is not to flip through the content,
but to look at the back cover,
where you can find the book’s “label”.
Now it’s time for..
Tim's business talk!
If you buy a book in the US, there’s a good chance
that it was put out by one of the Big Five,
this is sounding like some anime villain squad reveal...
anyhow those five publishers 
have about 80% of the market share.
These giant publishers have dozens of smaller imprints,
with each imprint focusing on a specific genre or market,
such as literary fiction, romance, YA, comics, etc.
In Japan publishing works in a similar way,
with big media companies having smaller imprints
or labels dedicated specifically to light novels.
And different labels will publish
different types of light novels.
Even if you haven’t read a light novel you
probably know the plot to a lot of them,
because they’ve been the basis for
dozens of animes over the past 20 years.
"Baccano!", "Durarara!!", "Fate/", "Fullmetal Panic", "Toradora", "Sword Art Online", "Overlord",
"Re:Zero", "Violet Evergreen", "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime",
And SO MUCH MORE all started life as light novels.
At its peak in 2012 the most popular light novel series
were selling over a million volumes a year in Japan.
That’s a lot of bunkobon.
And while they’re still not close to
doing manga numbers,
titles like "One Piece" routinely sell over
ten MILLION copies in Japan alone,
a million copies is nothing to laugh at.
Okay, so light novels are books put out
by certain Japanese publishers
with easy to digest texts and manga style illustrations.
But where did the light novel come from?
According to a 2016 article by Kim Morrissy
for Anime News Network,
the term "light novel" originated on an
scifi and fantasy forum around 1990,
by a user who enjoyed the illustrated genre fiction
coming out of major Japanese publishing houses,
but disliked the established term “YA” or "Young Adult"
because these books appealed to
more than just young adults.
But the genre itself existed long before 1990.
While it’s hard to pin down an exact date,
creation of publisher Sonorama Bunko in 1975
is often credited as the start of the genre.
Sonorama Bunko was an imprint of Asahi Sonorama,
a company established in 1959 to
release an audio news magazine
on actual floppy discs called flexi discs.
Imagine going out and buying a record of the daily news.
While the sound quality wasn’t great,
the flexible records could be easily
and cheaply bound into magazines,
which is exactly what Asahi Sonorama did.
While the floppy news slices weren’t a hot seller,
a boom in pop culture in the 1960s
lead Asahi Sonorama
to pivot to more fan oriented content.
They had success with magazine/record combos
that featured popular manga and movie characters.
So why are we talking about old-ass flexi music technology?
Because this combination of different types of media
is at the core of what makes light novels special.
Take, for example, Sonorama Bunko’s most successful title,
"Vampire Hunter D",
a light novel which features a fantasy setting
and Yoshitaka Amano’s gorgeous illustrations.
Would Hideyuki Kikuchi’s story
be as popular as it is today
without Amano’s iconic artwork?
It’s hard to say, but the combination
of manga-style drawings
and an easy to read fantasy novel
was a winning combination,
and one that other publishers were quick to copy.
The practice of expanding popular content into other mediums
is known as the media mix,
and it’s a huge part of how the anime industry works.
Our producer Jesse might have
summed the media mix up best:
"Always Be Branding, Always"
And if any company is the ABBA of the media mix,
it would be Kadokawa,
which owns "Overlord", "Sword Art Online",
and "Re:Zero", among many, many others.
Kadokawa Genyoshi founded Kadokawa
Books right after the Second World War.
Kadokawa believed publishing played an
important role in rebuilding post war Japan,
stating that through publishing quality
literature his company would
"persistently point the path toward the reconstruction
and ordering of the culture of our homeland”.
That statement is still printed in the back
of Kadokawa books to this day.
The media mix as we see it today was
the work of his son Kadokawa Haruki.
Haruki took over the family business and
immediately started shaking things up.
He started by licencing and translating
novelizations of popular American movies.
Once the novels became popular he would 
release the movie the novel was based on,
using the novels as built in advertising for the movies.
But his biggest breakthrough came with
his “holy trinity” strategy:
combining text, sound, and image.
Yes, he actually called it the holy trinity.
Much of his inspiration came from 
the American media industry
where he sourced his raw materials.
He saw that in the US a popular book
would get people to watch the movie,
and the movie would get people to buy the soundtrack,
and that often all those companies,
the movie studio, the record label,
and the publisher,  were all owned by the same people.
That’s just a little vertical integration for you.
Kadokawa found that this strategy
worked best for large franchises
with many characters in interconnecting stories.
And you can see that strategy at work
in many of your favorite series today.
How many characters are there in
Gundam or the Fate Series,
which is spread across multiple shows,
manga, dramas, and yes, light novels.
Kadokawa might have perfected the media mix strategy,
but they didn’t start it.
It goes all the way back to the granddaddy
of anime himself, Tezuka.
In the 1960s Osamu Tezuka sold
the anime Astro Boy  at a loss,
because tv studios were unwilling to take
a risk on an expensive animated series.
Astro Boy went on to become
an international sensation
and more than made back its budget
through merchandise and licensing,
and that system remains the status quo to this day.
Which is why you can literally live off
branded Evangelion products.
The entire manga industry exists in
stark contrast to American comics.
While the massively successful
Marvel movies haven't translated
into a boost in comic book sales stateside,
anime are basically ads to sell
manga, merch, and now light novels.
Many light novels come from the Japanese
website Shōsetsuka ni Narō,
which means “Lets become a Novelist”.
Started in 2004, Syo-setu.com is a free website
where users can upload their novels
and readers can comment and react.
It’s sort of like Archive Of Our Own,
but for "OCs Do Not Steal!!" only.
The site gets over a billion page views a month
and has launched some of the
most popular light novel titles.
Like "I Want to Eat Your Pancreas", "Log Horizon", 
"Overlord", "Re:Zero",
"The Irregular at Magic High School", and 
"The Rising of the Shield Hero"
all got their start on Shōsetsuka ni Narō.
The website is so important to light novels and isekai
that the term "narou" or “let’s become”
is interchangeable with "isekai".
"Monster Bunko", a light novel imprint from publisher Futabasha
exists exclusively to make light novels out
of popular stories on shosetsuka ni narou.
Reports have surfaced of professional 
editors having to rewrite entire manuscripts
after the authors sourced from narou, 
often without any formal writing experience,
were unable to fill plot holes or fix pacing issues.
Japan has a long history of being on
the cutting edge of media,
and light novels, which are a mashup of
YA, manga, fanfiction and art,
might be the future of literature.
Japan has one of the longest traditions
of popular literature in the world.
"The Tale of Genji", written in the 11th
century by a Japanese noblewoman,
is often called the very first novel.
"Taketori Monogatari", also known as
"The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter"
or "The Tale of Princess Kaguya",
is one of the earliest examples of proto-science fiction.
In the story we have a princess
from the moon who is sent to Earth
for protection during a celestial war.
Sound familiar?
Popular fiction and lending libraries
have been a common
part of Japanese life since the Edo period.
Well, that's all we have time for today,
Ladies and Gentlemen.
That's the history of light novels
Thanks so much for checking us out.
And ya'll know the rest.
But please why don't ya click that subscribe button.
Y'know? Maybe the bell icon.
Yeah, love those light novels, too.
Those light novel titles like:
"I CAN'T BELIEVE I GOT SENT TO AN CRUNCHYROLL
ISEKAI WORLD WHERE I HAVE TO DO
THE HISTORY OF LIGHT NOVELS"
Bye bye, now!
