Jan
Good afternoon to everyone from Spain. Name’s Alex, and I’m making this first of many blog posts for Tentai books starting from 2023.
Though we have been silent the last months, I’ve spent these mostly doing a lot of internal changes in hopes to have faster, more streamlined releases, as well as starting and maintaining consistency with our social media presence, support mail presence, etc… Which is why we hired a new person to handle all of our socials, including discord. His name is Nick, and he’ll be the new person in charge of everything related to public relations. The main reason we have him in is because, well, I’m pretty busy! I’ve taken over all of the novel series, and am currently working as hard as I can to finish / polish upcoming releases.
Though I had plans to release way more things at the end of 2022, the fact of the matter is that the editing process became a bottleneck in 2 of our projects, those being “You like me don’t you 2” and “Ice Queen 2.” I am stubborn and wanted those books out before the rest, so I delayed all of the releases because of that. My apologies.
So, with that out of the way, it is time for me to talk about what’s going to happen in 2023 (anything at this point would be more than 2022, am I right?) and how things are gonna change around here.
- We are still working on the new website, albeit slowly. For the time being, we’ll be focused this month / next month on updating a lot of stuff from our current website, which has definitely felt the abandonment.
- I’ve been finishing volumes of several series we have going on (side character 4, world teacher 2 & 3, etc…) and I’ll strive to make more immediate releases the moment I grab my hands on the licenses of subsequent volumes (which is one of the main reasons some series, like toxic classmate, are being delayed, since the JP publisher wants us to release other volumes before giving us following volumes of another series). I will announce their release dates one or two weeks in advance. Giving long term release dates is not realistic for us at the moment, and my goal is to regain the people’s trust on us, so giving accurate release dates is one of my priorities!
- We’ll be more focused on marketing our products (which has been kinda non existent for the existence of the company).
- We’re also in the process of making a more detailed and relatively complete shipping policy, which will help solve a lot of questions people have about our shipping.
- We partnered with DHL / GLS (shipping companies) to handle our premium shipments from now on. We expect less delays and problems with any sort of shipment starting the next two or three months.
- As I mentioned last year, we have a manga licensed. We also have all of the extras acquired as well in order to create content such as new bookmarks, stickers, postcards with them. They are japan-limited content, so look forward to these! Some hints for this series: it’s very short (6 volumes, closed) and it not only has a happy ending, but it’s a romcom with some spicy elements to it as well! As for the announcement, I’m thinking of doing it once we’ve released many of the volumes that have been bottlenecked for months, even years, by now, such as world teacher, and ice queen (mainly these two). Once they are released, I’ll talk about a more precise date schedule.
- We’ll reduce our number of simultaneous series to at most 3/4. The main reason is that, for the time being, I’ll be the only translator working on these, so overworking myself isn’t exactly what I’m aiming for here.
- We have our physical designs for most of the books who haven’t received this treatment yet already planned. My idea is to make a big print run around May if possible, which is when the prices go lower. I can’t stress enough how much prices have spiked since last year. Almost 50% in some cases. I will try to stay committed to not elevate the pricing in our books, but for me to do this, it is necessary to delay printing to a time when it’ll be favorable for us to do so. Apologies in advance, and hopefully everyone understands this!
Last but not least, I’d personally like to hear the opinions of those who follow us and like what we do. What genres would you like us to explore in the future? Though we still have some backlog to clear, it is true that I also need to keep licenses ready so we don’t run out of work. I personally was thinking of a couple of Mecha series, with not only romance, but a more serious tone as well. However, the ones who decide in the end are you guys! Would you prefer us to continue selling romcoms? Or maybe something else? Let us know in our socials or Discord!
Before I leave you, I’d like to share the World Teacher covers for the upcoming volumes. Volume 3 is almost done, and I personally can’t wait to release these and get back on schedule already.
Well then, that’s everything said! I’m going to keep bligging monthly, so that way everyone is informed better about us and what we do!
Have a good one, and here’s hoping for a great 2023!
Alex
