After many years — and over 350 titles released — J-Novel Club will now officially publish Boys Love titles. Haru Sakura & Mitsuya’s Romance Revived: An NPC Was the Final Boss’s Love and Miori Kayamoto & Karatsuyu’s The Despicable Duke Settles His Affairs were announced tonight to lead off the publisher’s BL imprint, J-Novel Knight. But outside of them announcing the new imprint late last year, there’s still much to learn about JNC Knight and where it will go from here. So TheOASG reached out over email and asked 5 questions about it, and J-Novel Club’s Director of Business Development and Content, Madison Salters, took the time to answer them for us. Read below to get a sense of where the imprint will go moving forward.
TheOASG: Will first ask if you can share what you can about yourself — this can range from how you got the opportunity to work for J-Novel Club to how you came to fall in love with Boys Love works.
Madison Salters: J-Novel Club has a diverse staff with diverse reading tastes and we’ve wanted to launch a BL line for a while to bring more barrier-pushing stories to English language readers. For many staff members, BL is a foundational genre, and we poured a lot of time, effort, and love into this label launch which is also personally meaningful to many of us. You can read a ton about the history of BL in our #KnightBites series over on @JNC_Knight for what makes this genre so foundational and amazing.
Sam (J-Novel Club Chief Executive Officer) has talked a bit over the years about J-Novel Club and them publishing BL titles, but there were challenges in doing so — can you share some of the challenges along the way in launching the J-Novel Knight imprint?
J-Novel Club publishes in print, audio, and digital, but the majority of our books are in digital format. BL has a heavy fan tradition of collection in paperback volumes. It took time to establish trust in the western digital market — that fans will appreciate these important, exciting, and fun stories as eBooks, and be excited about reading them in parts as we stream them as soon as new sections are translated. We also wanted to give the imprint the time it deserved, to get all the elements right.
What do you think will be the toughest part of handling the JNC Knight imprint moving forward now that it has officially launched, or is it at a place where there should be no restrictions on what type of BL titles will be published under the imprint?
We can’t predict where the difficulties will lie, but we modify our approach with fan and market feedback. We want to make sure we can keep producing the types of stories that BL fans are excited to read.
Can you share, or give a ballpark number, of how often we will be seeing JNC Knight titles being published over the next few years — or as an example, we won’t suddenly go from 2 being released today to 10 being announced in the next licensing event?
You’ll just have to keep an eye on us for that! But we do have plans to continue announcing new series — Knight is here to stay.
The imprint is leading off with two BL light novel reincarnation works — Romance Revived: An NPC Was the Final Boss’s Love and The Despicable Duke Settles His Affairs. What makes these two titles the best way to kick off the new imprint?
Ironically, both involve Knights — of a sort– though we promise we didn’t plan the name around that. We feel that these are both wonderful “take back” stories: tales where unlikely heroes are changing destiny, rewriting scripts, and even writing wrongs while achieving agency and going after love. They’re also both reincarnation series, which are a staple of Kadokawa books and one of the most important genres of LN, and we wanted to start off on that strong foundational footing. We think they’re both exciting in different ways and we can’t wait to hear what readers think.