Tentai Books’ End of the Year Update. What’s happening in 2022?

Good afternoon everyone. I’m Alex, and I’m here with most likely the last update for 2021. I have a lot to talk about our current plants and upcoming projects, but to summarize things up, 2021, though shaky at times, has been a good year for us, and we plan to speed things up as things are looking up.

First of all, I want to thank everyone for their patience with our lengthy release dates between volumes. Though I am aware that we’ve been particularly slow with many of the books (looks at world teacher and side character), I can assure you guys that there have been reasons behind it, but I’m committed to bring back to schedule side character next year (we’ll be catching up with Japan in volumes), and we’re releasing more World Teacher next year for sure.

Anyway, since this is going to be a lengthy post, I will divide the topics and go one by one:

NA / EU Distribution

Up until now, we’ve been exclusively selling our books through our website, mainly because for the past 6-7 months I’ve been working with INGRAM (our newest distributor) to have our books widely available throughout the world. We’ll start slow with NA distribution, and eventually expand it more fully to Europe and Australia. This partnership will come into effect the 26th of February of 2022. This is an exact date and it won’t change. What does it mean? That by then, all of our already existing and upcoming releases will be available for preorder and other stuff through Amazon, BookDepository, Barnes & Noble, Indigo, etc… This is truly a new step for us, and definitely a game changer. I hope everyone is looking forward to it as much as I am, because this has been a long process, but it’s finally bearing its fruits after lots of effort.

What does this mean for our distribution though? Initially I had more faith in our primary parcel distributor, but after a year of work and many packages and experiences, I’ve decided that eventually I’ll be closing the economy package options at some point in the next year. The reason is simple, which is that:

1. These packages lack tracking codes, making it difficult for both us and the customers to locate them.
2. Some of these packages are lost, and they cause a lot of trouble for both us and the customers, many of these occasions ending with us losing money before the sale was even made.
3. Sometimes the packages take too long to arrive, making customer experience overall negative, in spite of the low price of shipping.

Which means that we will only keep premium shipping from our website in the future. Fortunately, our distributor will be able to make the books accessible through many other means, so the changes will hopefully not be dramatic. The only big change is that, though we will only keep premium shipping, we will make sure that it is as worth as possible to invest in this shipping. How? You may ask, by doing these things:

1. Our physicals will include nice extras, ones that won’t be accessible anywhere else but from our store. For example, limited art in the form of postcards, etc…
2. We will include the digital edition of the physical book you purchase for free if you do so from our store.

There are other ideas in mind, but for the time being these will be the changes that will come sooner. As for when, most likely into Q2 / Q3.

Book Size

Following up on this, Seatmate Killer will be the last series we produce that has the standard size we’ve been using so far for every series we have right now.

The new size for our books, starting with Toxic Classmate, will be 127 x 190 mm.

Does this mean that the current series we’re producing physically will be changed in size as well? No. Those will stay with the classic size and will continue to do so until the end.

We won’t be changing the materials we’ve been using for our books either. We’re always striving to create the highest quality Light Novels possible, and this commitment stands at all times.

New Stuff in Store for the Future

I mentioned this somewhere else, but we have licensed a manga series. It’s a romcom with some ecchi spicy content. Will this be announced anytime soon? No. The answer is simple: first we want to take care of the series we currently have, stabilize and end some of them, and once all of that is done I’ll resume new licensing and presenting the manga.

For now these are the things that will change the most. We’re also working on a brand new website from the ground up, but until I have more specific news about that I won’t develop this any further.

Upcoming Releases

From Toxic Classmate to Girlfriend Goals

This will be the first of the new novels we release. It’s been in the works for a while, but it’s finally coming for everyone the 28th of December digitally, and the 28th of January in physical form.

The physical will include three special bookmarks (two exclusive from our store only) and an exclusive postcard (our store only). It’ll be our first book with the new size (127 x 190mm), and it’ll be our first physical book with different cover and dust jacket.

There’s no way a side character like me could be popular, right? Volume 3

A lot of people have been waiting for this one, and I’ve been doing so as well, not gonna lie. It’s releasing the 7th of February digitally, 7th of March physically.

Though it’s still a ways away, we have planned a special postcard added with the physicals. It will have extra limited art of Touka. Both the physical and digital version will have the extra stories with them (there are 6 of them this time).

We want to do a couple of bookmarks as well, but those will come to play later, as we currently have no designs for them to show.

Outcasts Restaurant 2

It’s been a long time since the last one, but we’re picking up with this series, releasing the 21st of February digitally. There are no physical versions of this novel for the time being, so I won’t talk about those.

I Kissed My Girlfriend’s Little Sister & You Like me, don’t you?

These two are coming up in the next couple of months, but I’ll talk more in detail about the both of them as their release dates get closer.

Ice Queen 2 & Seatmate Killer 2

Just want to reiterate in this post that these two novels are under production at the moment, and we’ll have more news about them coming up early next year.

As a closing statement, I do want to thank everyone again for the overwhelming support we’ve gotten over this year. It has been way higher than we were expecting, and we’re very happy and looking forward to what happens next year, since it’s going to be a big one for us. We’ve noticed how everyone especially likes our physical editions, and we’ll strive to improve them as much as possible, while keeping up with the digital releases, of course.

Thank you for reading and see you next year! Happy holidays to everyone!