AHC: Create an American counterpart to light novels

For those who don't know: Light novels is a style of Japanese novel primarily targeting high schoolers and middle schoolers. The average length of a light novel is 50,000 words, usually don't last more than 200 pages and published in bunkobon size (A6, 10.5 cm x 14.8 cm). A distinguishing trait of light novels is they are usually illustrated with an anime/manga style for the covers and interior illustrations and published in separate book volumes and serialized in anthology magazines, similar to manga.

With a POD of the early 1950s, create possible conditions for an American counterpart for light novels to exist.
 
Lighter, often partially illustrated reads for older elementary students and young teens were a thing when I was growing up in the 90s. And Bev Cleary’s books at least fit those specs from an earlier era. Only thing missing is the serial publishing and physical size requirements.

Maybe comics just dominated the serialized market too heavily here. It seems like that’s where you’d want to look to make this happen; get comics publishers to give short novels a try?
 
Lighter, often partially illustrated reads for older elementary students and young teens were a thing when I was growing up in the 90s. And Bev Cleary’s books at least fit those specs from an earlier era. Only thing missing is the serial publishing and physical size requirements.

Maybe comics just dominated the serialized market too heavily here. It seems like that’s where you’d want to look to make this happen; get comics publishers to give short novels a try?

YA literature probably fills the same niche already, but it needs a popularity boost as a format, not limited to individual series.
 
For those who don't know: Light novels is a style of Japanese novel primarily targeting high schoolers and middle schoolers. The average length of a light novel is 50,000 words, usually don't last more than 200 pages and published in bunkobon size (A6, 10.5 cm x 14.8 cm). A distinguishing trait of light novels is they are usually illustrated with an anime/manga style for the covers and interior illustrations and published in separate book volumes and serialized in anthology magazines, similar to manga.

With a POD of the early 1950s, create possible conditions for an American counterpart for light novels to exist.

Sounds a lot like the Pre-WWII illustrated Nancy Drew novels, 180 to 200 pages
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I can certainly see short illustrated novels happening more than they did. As a counterpart to the manga-style illustrations, maybe the text could be accompanied by standard American comic book art. It would be in panels and strips, with text and dialog, corresponding to the story. There would probably be a mixture of those illustrating the whole story and those illustrating just selected parts.

Serialization would be more difficult, if that is a defining characteristic. American readers, and even more so American writers, cannot abide the words "to be continued" unless preceded by a cliffhanger. I don't know how long the segments are in the Japanese light novels, but if the story is 50,000 words, there would easily need to be five or ten cliffhanger moments per story. The genre would become shaped by the need to make the reader anxiously anticipate the next installment. Competition between authors in an anthology would become fierce, too. I don't see the US version breaking down stories into more than two or three parts, and each magazine would need to have just two or three stories, with some common thread between them.

Detective or police stories would work well (I'm thinking of the grittier kind, not Nancy Drew Mysteries), with two or three cases per issue. Maybe they'd be staggered so that every issue has a new case, a continuation, and a resolution. Or maybe they'd be synchronized -- that way, you could guarantee higher sales for the issues with the endings, and charge a premium for advertising space. Because there would be ads. It's the American way.
 
In Japanese light novels, the books are published in separate volumes or serialized in anthology magazines like Japanese manga. Majority of the books is A6 (105×148mm or 4.1"×5.8") in size, often published in dense schedules (For example, one volume of a series published per month).
The main genres popular in light novels right now is Isekai (Different World) genre. The main convention of the genre is always a young male Japanese teenager who is transported to a fantasy world through strange means, and in this world the main protagonist gains special abilities or gets a cast of girls. Generally, the main genres in light novel publishing is usually fantasy fiction along with science fiction and horror with a small subset of crime and thriller. The main demographic for light novels are high school and middle school students.

With a POD of 1950s, I'm not sure how science fiction, fantasy and horror genres would fit the target demographic in the American counterpart for light novels. Understand that science fiction and fantasy was considered childish, crime and horror had a massive backlash over moral concerns.
 
Edward Stratemeyer's Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew publications were probably the closest western equivalent (at least that I know of).

Perhaps somehow make them more popular, and you could get people trying to copy the format, including some trying to make more mature versions as the original market begins to grow up and trying to apply it to non-mystery books.

edit: I wonder how that could impact the Golden Age of Comics?
 
YA literature probably fills the same niche already, but it needs a popularity boost as a format, not limited to individual series.
Agreed - As I have heard them called 'Chapter Books' where there are actual chapters of text. The old Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Historical ones such as the Young Thomas Jefferson (and other similar ones) used to be popular https://books.google.com/books/about/Tom_Jefferson.html?id=jBpliAlxrU4C

Now the Boxcar Kids series, Captain Underpants, https://books.google.com/books?id=S...EINjAC#v=onepage&q=Captain Underpants&f=false and similar books provide the transition from 'board books' and Berenstein Bears books https://books.google.com/books?id=6...jAhVqh-AKHfXRDLQQ6AEIOjAC#v=onepage&q&f=false to adult level books
 
I generally thought of it as "a comic, but in novel form, and with more details".

The main features of a Japanese light novels are:
  • Targets at a high school and middle school demographic
  • Average length is 50,000 words
  • Doesn't last more than 200 pages
  • Often paperback
  • Published in bunkobon size (A6, 10.5 cm x 14.8 cm)
  • Published in separate books as volumes or serialized in anthology magazines
  • Published in dense publishing schedules (One volume of a series per month)
  • Illustrated in anime/manga style for covers and interior illustrations.
  • Considered the text-based cousin of anime and manga
The American counterpart of a light novel in the ATL is similar to the specifics, except replace anime/manga style illustrations with American comic book/cartoon style, and considered the text-based cousin of American comics and animation.

If you're wondering what it should look like, here is my examples as references:
d4c5oyn-d30922d6-95d1-46ad-a228-6026ca4dc804.jpg

3d6f9fe628c46f12d33138d6523c2e63.jpg
 
The main features of a Japanese light novels are:
  • Targets at a high school and middle school demographic
  • Average length is 50,000 words
  • Doesn't last more than 200 pages
  • Often paperback
  • Published in bunkobon size (A6, 10.5 cm x 14.8 cm)
  • Published in separate books as volumes or serialized in anthology magazines
  • Published in dense publishing schedules (One volume of a series per month)
  • Illustrated in anime/manga style for covers and interior illustrations.
  • Considered the text-based cousin of anime and manga
The American counterpart of a light novel in the ATL is similar to the specifics, except replace anime/manga style illustrations with American comic book/cartoon style, and considered the text-based cousin of American comics and animation.

If you're wondering what it should look like, here is my examples as references:
d4c5oyn-d30922d6-95d1-46ad-a228-6026ca4dc804.jpg

3d6f9fe628c46f12d33138d6523c2e63.jpg

I've read light novels more like 400 pages long.
 
Will American LNs also have overly long titles?

Jokes aside, I wonder how well the current American pop culture environment would support something similar to Japanese LNs. One question is how closely you want to American LNs to resemble their Japanese counterparts. In the Japanese pop culture LNs, manga and anime very much interact, influence and feed each other in quite closely-knit fashion and I would say this to be one of the main features when we think the medium. Otherwise we would be probably just talking abour serialized novellas with some drawings in them and I don't think that is OP's intention.

Although LNs do have they roots further back, arguably they really started to develop into the form we would recognize in the 1990's, the publication of Boogiepop and Others in 1998 being the point when they really took off. So I don't think you even necessarily need a POD that far back, though it makes things probably easier.

Just throwing out some random idea, you could have a comic writer who for some reason or another has had difficulties with his publisher and hasn't been able to participate in any projects for sometime. Probably someone with at least some name recognition to make things easier. However, he does have an idea for a story which he would like to get published in some form. Maybe the publisher's refusal to go along with this idea was even the reason for their fallout. He has some friend in some book publishing company who becomes interested in the story and they decide to publish it, though names of characters and such are obviously changed. The format allows the author to go deeper in details and is full of meta-commentary of American comic industry in general, in addition to few shots at his former employer and their stories. The book becomes a success among comic book fans and quickly becomes serialized. Other companies and authors notice this success and similar series start to get published, some even starting to get their own comics based on these LNs and the circle is full.

In reality, you probably need to do some groundwork in wider pop culture before this could actually happen. Somehow integrating novels and such more closely to comic books culture earlier would make the creation of something similar to LNs more likely. And although American comic books are more varied than some people say, somehow lessening the dominant status of superheroes and few particular characters in that genre might make this easier. I actually feel that although LNs are just one medium, having them to become an integral part of American pop culture might have surprisingly big effects.

Maybe comics just dominated the serialized market too heavily here. It seems like that’s where you’d want to look to make this happen; get comics publishers to give short novels a try?

It should be noted that manga is even more ubiquitous in Japan than comics are in the US and those two mediums are still able to co-exist.
 
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