/lit/ - Literature

>>12239337
I’ve never been tempted to read a web novel or a self published book. What’s the point of writing something I wouldn’t read?

>>12239337
Suppose I put an anime cover on my work of fiction to attract weeb readers. Would my prose actually have to change? Could I pass a perfectly Western novel with Western sensibilities as weeb material by just putting a weeb cover on it? What are the conventions of a weeb novel? Do I have to say every boy is feminine and cute?

>>12239384
100% no. Weeb novels have an elaborate and extensive set of conventions you have to follow, and various things you have to avoid. The escapism is typically on a far higher level. They are very different from western novels, with extremely rare exceptions.

>>12239405
>Open novel with weeb image cover
>Plump, stately Buck Mulligan...

>>12239466
>... was on his way to Isekai Prefectural High School when a beautiful young girl fell from the sky.

>>12239384
It happens all the time. The author took tones from japanese web novels and made it their own thing, it's a very western style novel though when I read it on royalroad. If you want to see more of weeb-westerns crosses, royalroad is basically that in a nutshell.

>>12239405
>Weeb novels have an elaborate and extensive set of conventions you have to follow, and various things you have to avoid
Japanese troupes, japanese audience, japanese language. If the audience changes so to does the content change. I've read royalroad stories that mimic the 'prose style' of light novels and they get a lot of attention, some even sell. It's a bigger market than you think, but selling to teenagers/weeb readers isn't as easy as you think it is.

>>12239552
I get the impression that nobody reads these though. People who want to read something western aren't interested in weebshit, and people who want weebshit aren't interested in faux-weeb imitations. Maybe I'm wrong, but at least it's definitely not a popular style compared to its inspirations.
>Japanese troupes, japanese audience, japanese language.
It's more than just that, for whatever reason light novels are significantly more monolithic than manga for example. They're overwhelmingly aimed at high school boys with social difficulties who want stories involving a self insertable main character, tons of female characters, and only non-threatening male characters if even any main male characters at all. This is the classic weeb novel, though there are of course exceptions.

>>12239582
>I get the feeling that no one
The sales numbers don't lie. This isn't a new thing, stuff that you never would think would sell is selling because the internet allows everyone to get everything every which way possible. This is why 50 shades which was a twilight fanfic got adopted to film, it got enough traction with free readers then paying readers. Markets change and grow with the times, and this one is actually growing not falling.
Also, western imitations of japanese stuff sell to the Chinese like hotcakes and like 800m of them have smartphones, no chance of getting a date and if they do they still live in China so they hate life and will do anything to escape it.

>overwhelmingly aimed at high school boys with social difficulties who want stories involving a self insertable main character

What happened in the japanese market is that manga costs more than internet novels and you can make more money off selling light novel versions of the web novels than selling manga.
It's cheaper, it gets the young male audience, and enough of them buy because of the girls so they can churn out series like this indefinitely just picking whatever web novel is the most famous at the moment. So I think it's kind of unfair to characterize light novels as 'trashier', the kind of light novels targeted towards boys to sell them pictures of girls with swords is definitely trashy but this is anime we are talking about, everyone in the industry thinks they are trash anyways.

>>12239359
Making caaaash

>>12239466
>Plump, stately

>>12239700
>western imitations of japanese stuff sell to the Chinese like hotcakes
What a world we live in