Light Novels, Web Serials, and why people read and write them

Or, what can we learn from popular internet fiction?

I got a freelance gig! I am proofreading a light novel for a publisher. I will not name names because I would like to get more work in the future.

After several hours of staring at a screen trying to spot every error contained within the 192-page proof, I started to think things like, “What even is a light novel?” and “Are they all like this? Why are they all like this?” and “Who is reading this?”

So I looked into it.

Many, many light novels are about a normal guy (or sometimes girl) being reincarnated into a generic vaguely pre-Industrial European-inspired fantasy world, or the world of a video game they’ve played or book they’ve read. Or they’re about a character originally from that world getting sent back in time to try their life over again. But a lot of light novels are more straightforward contemporary romcoms, or hard scifi. They’re also not only published in Japanese: Chinese and Korean web serials published in print are treated like light novels in the US too.

I read Japanese literature in translation¹, but I’ve only really read a few volumes of The Apothecary Diaries light novels, and now this assignment. I felt like the light novels I’ve read were notably more stilted and less naturalistic than the literary novels I’d read, but my sample size was clearly not representative. So I looked up the free samples of a bunch of light novels, and it’s true. There are some light novels that are not actively painful to read!

The opening of There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… a yuri harem romcom, reads identically to any random contempary YA novel, for example. It feels natural and it puts you in the situation and characters immediately. Maybe not high art, but not unbearable either. It’s what YA people call “voicey narration.”

But then here’s the opening of the most recent title available on J-Novel Club, Reborn to Reign: Imposing My Rules with My Mastery of Magic.

Something about this just makes me roll my eyes as soon as I see it…

I was wondering what the difference was between Light Novels and Literary Novels, and apparently it’s literally just that the former has illustrations by mangaka and is published by light novel imprints. Light novels (hereafter referred to as LNs) are usually long-running, multi-volume series that are published very quickly, and many books are picked up for print publication after first serializing for free on a website called Shousetsuka ni Narou (Let’s Become Novelists!). A website which operates similarly to Wattpad in the English-speaking world.

The biggest difference between LNs and Wattpad print editions, though, is that printing an LN is very likely to lead to an anime and manga adaptation, as well as dozens of spinoffs if it does well. Most Wattpad originals get one adaptation if they’re lucky.

Wattpad is the only webfiction portal I’m aware of that has official recommendations and resources for the creators who post on it, and I think those are really interesting! Wattpad emphasizes the importance of focused, linear, fast-paced storytelling… and fitting into their Key Verticals. On Wattpad, you are writing for distracted readers, so you have to do everything you can to keep their attention. You want to make sure people start reading and keep reading, chapter after chapter after chapter.

Here’s the Wattpad Originals version of a book compared with the version that was eventually printed to be sold in bookstores: Night Owls and Summer Skies, a story I first discovered through its Webtoon adaptation. (Like how people discover light novels from their manga adaptations.)

The webnovel version has much less description and introspection and jumped to the interaction much more quickly.

Light novels pulled from SSNN get revised significantly and add a lot of additional bonus content to entice readers who’d already read the story online to buy the print edition, and Wattpad Books seems to be doing something similar. Which makes it all the more annoying to me that some fanfics that get pulled to publish barely revise anything at all but whatever! It’s fine!

For English-language webnovel enthusiasts, there are plenty of websites besides Wattpad to post on. Honeyfeed in particular is targeted towards the LN crowd, hosting frequent contests where the grand prize is publication in Japan and/or a manga adaptation.

Royal Road and Scribblehub are popular for litRPG, isekai and progression fantasy enthusiasts, and have their own conventions.

I didn’t find official guidelines or recommendations for how to do numbers on either platform, but a post on the Scribblehub forum suggested being active on the forums and engaging with the community before starting to post a story, and that most people won’t even click on an unfinished work unless it has over 100 chapters (at 1500-2000 words each, that’s over 150k words you have to write before people start reading your book!) For Royal Road, I found this guide, which is a lot more focused on monetizing your work. There’s a lot of overlap between how these guys treat Progression Fantasy and how romance ebook authors treat their romance ebook writing, which I thought was interesting. Consistency and keen understanding of the market can take anyone far, it seems.

I can understand some Japanese (enough to look at the SSNN website and find the FAQ pages without having to hit the translate button lol) but definitely not enough to try and track down a forum board with a how to light novel guide in it. But I do know that the reason most light novels have stupid long titles these days is because it’s what gets more clicks on that website.

I think the main reason light novels haven’t taken off in the US like this is… well, it’s cheaper to print books without pictures in them, first of all, and we already have well-established local conventions for SFF, romance, and young adult fiction. We also don’t have the same culture of people admiring illustrators and cartoonists enough to seek them out when they illustrate fiction by someone else I’m sure people were picking up No Freaking Way for Eku Takeshima’s beautiful art, but as much as I hate to admit it, comics and illustration in the United States are Fucking NICHE. I’ve picked up romance novels because I recognized Rebecca Mock’s art on the cover, but I highly doubt anyone else has ever done that.

Writing a novel on SSNN comes with the possibility of getting picked up for publication by default, but the odds are slimmer on the Western sites. So why post web serials instead of querying agents? Maybe because the stories that interest you are less represented in traditional publishing, or because you want to tell a longrunning epic. But I think the biggest motivation is to participate in a community. People read these stories, they get really into them, they comment and post on the forums and then they want to write their own.

I tried entering a light novel contest thing last year and won nothing whatsoever, which is fine. The story I’d come up with for the contest was, once again, wildly unmarketable, about a girl and a singing robot working together to make music. The appeal for me was the short minimum word count (only 35k words! That’s like half of a real book!) The friends I’d showed it to enjoyed it, but when I experimentally tried posting it on Tapas, Wattpad, and Royal Road, maybe 10 strangers clicked on it across all 3 sites. I wasn’t advertising this project on my socials, but I also wasn’t engaging with the communities on these webnovel portals either or reading the existing zeitgeist. Why should the loyal patrons of these portals read something random by a rando like me?

Anyway, I think the light novel I’m proofreading might possibly be not quite the best example of the form has to offer. A lot of things are arranged in a way that makes it obvious the author was imagining a manga panel or anime screenshot as he wrote it, and the stilted and repetitive quality I thought was a side effect of being a translation did not seem to apply to all light novels across the board. But even this light novel, while I was reading it, sometimes made me drop out of count-the-line-breaks proofreading mode and just enjoy a scene or character interaction for at least a few pages.

That effortless enjoyment is, I think, what all light novels are trying to achieve. The clarity of prose and adding new twists on a familiar sandbox of tropes is what gets light novel fans to read so many volumes of so many different series. That, and the feeling of being part of a community.

Have a favorite web novel or light novel? Feel free to drop a recommendation below!²

1. Within the last year: Butter, Idol, Burning, Strange Pictures/Houses, No Longer Human, Norwegian Wood

2. I am not reading Worm and I have already tried and bounced off of Katalepsis and Worth the Candle, but I haven’t attempted any of the other Big Name Web Serials if you want to pitch those at me lol