Tentai Books’ End of the Year Update

Hi there everyone. Alex here, and I’m writing this last blog update about Tentai before the year ends because there’s a LOT of stuff I need to talk about. This is going to be a long post, so get ready for the ride!

First of all, we recently migrated our website to a better hosting service. The last one we used wasn’t the best, to put it lightly, and we finally decided to move everything to a new space. These first weeks we’ll focus on solving some issues of users that have purchased digital books through our website but for some reason those books they purchased don’t appear in their downloads tab. That’s our current priority, but if you send us a mail to support@azure-studio.net we’ll manually resolve individual cases if anyone wants to read one of their books ASAP.

We’re also working on a website revamp behind the scenes. It’ll make it more interactive, user-friendly, and give us less headaches overall. We’re working on adding a lot of content about Authors, Illustrators, all of our licenses, and many other things to make visiting our website a comforting experience, as well as updating our product pages to look more interactive and accessible to everyone.

SIDE CHARACTER 2 PHYSICALS

Unfortunately we weren’t able to fulfill our promise to produce physicals of the second volume of Side Character this year. I personally apologize, but we had some pretty big setbacks, mainly our inability to get out of our homes because of the lockdown around the area where the company is located at.

Our plan is to have physicals for Side Character 2 Produced now one month after the release of World Teacher 1 along with the physicals of World Teacher, this being in March 2021.

WORLD TEACHER

We’ve had some issues with the management of World Teacher’s Translation process, but we finally have gathered a new team and we’ve set a precise date of release, this being the 19th of February. Physicals will come approximately one month after release, so look forward to those!

OUTCAST’S RESTAURANT 2

We’re working on acquiring the second volume of the series, we’ll give more detailed info next year!

NEW LICENSES & RELEASE SCHEDULE

You read right! We finished our licensing round, and it went exceptionally well! We got five new licenses, three from a new company, two from yet another new partner of ours. We’ll be releasing all of these titles both Digitally and Physically, Digital releasing approximately one month prior to Physical.

All of these licenses belong to the Romcom genre, so expect a lot of goodness coming in soon. Like this, we will be at a total of 8 series being worked on at the same time, each one with specific release dates. We don’t plan to expand our number of licenses. We want to stay at exactly 8 series, that way we guarantee that we’ll give each one the attention they need and the love they deserve, even if the time between releases of each iteration ends up being more spaced out than other pubs.

As far as things go, we have a bimonthly schedule release plan starting from next year, spearheaded by World Teacher in February and followed by our other licenses, both new and current ones.

We’ll announce three of the new licenses in March 2021, while we’ll save the other two left for later down the year, as we’d like to work on them before announcing their release.

NEW PHYSICALS APPROACH

Note that this new physical plan won’t affect Side Character’s physicals. We plan to maintain those just as they are in all of their aspects. The new physical plan (which will be our definitive plan) will apply starting from World Teacher 1 and the other series.

1. Their size will be reduced from 148 x 210 mm to 130 x 190 mm, closer to a more Japanese-oriented size of some modern light novels. We believe that this size is the best for our upcoming titles.
2. All of them will share a standardized design, one that we want people to associate with Tentai and what we represent.
3. We want all of our physicals to be special, so, if possible and with the approval of our partners, we’ll also produce special trading cards & bookmarkers with the extra art issued from Japan, exclusive to some retailers over there, to be included in all of our physicals. These cards and bookmarkers won’t add to the price of the books, which will stay the same as it has been so far (14.99 USD).
4. We want to continue our trend of adding the extra stories to the physical versions of the book to make them special and worth the buy.

As for other important changes regarding our policy with digital versions and physical editions of our books purchased from our website starting from World Teacher:

1. If you purchase a physical edition in our website you’ll be able to purchase the digital edition as well for half its price.
2. We will add the extra stories to our digital versions, but they will be in-store exclusives for Tentai Books, meaning that you’ll only be able to access them if you purchase digitally from our website.
3. The website revamp will include an in-store revamp, where we’ll offer different shipping options for physicals if you would prefer a speedy arrival of your goods—Our standard (and currently only) option adds 3$ (Europe) or 4$(Worldwide) to the base price of your physical orders as shipping costs. In exchange the packages tend to take around 3 weeks to one month to arrive. Therefore we’ll offer premium shipping options for those who want their orders to arrive as soon as possible.

BOOK DEPOSITORY

Although we don’t know when some borders will open for us, we plan to reach out to Book Depo as soon as possible next year. We’ll keep you updated on our plans.

Lastly, I’d like to thank everyone who has supported us and our products this year. Things have been going way better than what we initially expected, and we’re grateful and very excited for these results.

That’s pretty much everything!

I wish you all a happy Christmas and a happy new year as well. 2021 is going to be a blast!

Alejandro de Vicente