Dec
Hey there. Been a while since the last time I wrote around here.
There’s been a lot of requests for me to be more open about what’s going on with the status of our projects and the company, so here I am writing about it. I understand that it has been negligible from my end to not write more constantly, which is why I’ll strive for monthly updates, starting from this one. Even if there’s not a lot of progress in them, I’ll do it regardless.
It’s been a bunch of long months. I’ve been rebuilding the team with new stable members, and so far I think I’ve finally stabilized that front. We currently have:
- 2 Translators (Alan and Kelly)
- 1 Editor
- 2 QAs
- A book typesetter
- An image editor
- Yours truly
We will be the ones working on future releases from now on. Alan will start working on all the remaining volumes of Toxic Classmate, while Kelly will be finishing the Sister Kiss series, and moving on to other titles later down the line.
The current state of our books is as follows:
- World Teacher 3 is pending for typesetting, otherwise it is finished.
- Sister Kiss 2 is finished, and just needs typesetting to be released.
- The manga is at a stalemate because of licensing related issues. It’s hard for us to currently coordinate a physical release of such magnitude, which is what we’re being asked to do.
- Any other books not mentioned are currently being licensed.
I would also like to mention two things related to platforms pending to have our releases, those being Bookwalker and Google Play Books specifically:
- We submitted our books to Bookwalker recently. They’ll upload them after their Christmas vacation schedule, which is why it’ll take a bit. This is due to me sending the data in an untimely manner. Apologies for taking so long to release the books so late, this is my fault.
- Google Play Books is a complicated matter. Google is unreachable, and won’t let us get our original company account back, which makes further releases on that one difficult. This causes issues, mainly because if we want to release books number 2, 3, etc… of the same series from another account, Google flags them and takes them down. We hope to fix this issue eventually, but currently it is one of my most difficult things to manage.
I want to mention the current state of the physicals: right now, the printer we used to work with has raised pricing to almost double what it was a year ago, and most options overseas are either too expensive or a nightmare to handle by myself, which is why I decided to focus exclusively on digital copies for the time being, which will give us (and me) some breathing space, and a better way to release more things. Clearly I can’t handle everything at once, so making physicals will be something we will do (we are contractually bound to do so) but at a much later date. I also find it diffuclt to justify producing them for overseas distribution. This is because the last time we did it was a huge investment, and though we managed to recoup the investment quite well, the time gap between our payment and the payback from it was too large, making a hole in our finances and basically slowing everything down to a crawl. TLDR: though overseas production was a great success (we sold literally everything) it effectively slowed us down for months in return, making it a not-so-worth thing to do.
I once more remind everyone that we offer refunds for those who bought copies beforehand and would like to wait until we’re sure we can ship them. This goes for all who pre bought Ice Queen 2 and You Like Me 2 volumes. Reach out to tentaibooks@gmail.com if you want this to be done.
The current things we’ll do over this month and the coming ones are as follows:
- Release World Teacher 2, Sister Kiss 2, and the other Manga volumes (we will announce each release a couple of weeks in advance).
- Release volumes 2, 3, and 4 of Toxic Classmate.
- Slowly redo the website so it looks less static and abandoned.
- License and release the next volumes of Seatmate Killer.
I will also create a special Christmas sale: I think we’ve never had our books on sale, and it’s about time we do. I’ll make sure the discounts are pretty big to compensate for the lack of them.
Once everything starts being cleared, I’ve been thinking of keeping a schedule with only two series at a time, that way making things way more manageable.
I also want to briefly touch on the topic of Nick (our temporary community manager) leaving. Nick, for those who aren’t aware, managed our Instagram, Twitter, and Discord. He was a temporary replacement I needed while I sorted stuff out in other areas. That’s all.
On a side note, I never mentioned anything related to my meeting with SB Creative when I was in Japan (Toxic Classmate, Sister Kiss, You Like Me). They were very happy with the current sales, and are looking forward to collaborate more in terms of new titles whenever we have more leeway to license more. They mentioned mystery titles are on the rise now in Japan, so we’ll be looking into those whenever the time arrives. Granted, I do not check social media that much, and will mostly do to post things from now on. If you have inquiries, your best bet is our support mail tentaibooks@gmail.com.
I also want to mention that the new volumes for Sister Kiss and Toxic Classmate arrived at the office just yesterday, in fact. I’ll attach a picture to show everyone how they look.
I also want to mention on a last note that I’ll probably make our discord server announcement-only over the coming months. The reason is that it currently brings nothing but negativity towards us to the table (which I completely understand) but it also brings me a lot of unnecessary stress and ultimately doesn’t help anyone.
I think that’s everything! I’ll keep the monthly updates, even if they’re not very substantial, from now on.
Have a good one!