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:

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:

I would also like to mention two things related to platforms pending to have our releases, those being Bookwalker and Google Play Books specifically:

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:

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.

Forgive the lighting, I took this with my phone’s crappy camera.

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!

Greetings, everyone. I am Alex, with a very awaited update. It’s been a while since our last one, and I want to extend my sincere apologies for the silence. I have been in Japan, engaging with our licensing partners, both old and new, to strengthen our collaborations and mainly to know each other, since it’s the first time we see our faces. I’d like to take this opportunity to shed light on recent developments regarding the company and what we’ve been doing. 

During my time in Japan, I had the privilege of engaging in discussions with various publishers, including Futabasha (Ice Queen / Seatmate Killer). These conversations have given us valuable insights into our existing commitments and future prospects, which are good!

Allow me to address two significant matters that have arisen during these discussions:

1.Ice Queen and Seatmate Killer

The success of Ice Queen has been pretty surprising, and I deeply appreciate your support in making it one of our top-selling titles. We explored the possibility of continuing the series independently by commissioning the author and illustrator, but the path is plagued with legal complexities and paperwork that neither company wishes to undertake. Despite our best efforts, it doesn’t seem like a continuation for the series will be possible in any way, shape, or form.

Similarly, Seatmate Killer, faces its own challenges. As far as I’ve been able to guess, the author is missing and unreachable. Therefore, though volume 5 in Japan was scheduled for an eventual release, it has been delayed indefinitely.

Both Ice Queen and Seatmate Killer are, unfortunately, left unfinished due to the challenges mentioned above. We understand the disappointment this may bring, especially to those who have grown attached to these stories. We will, however, strive to release all of their books released so far nonetheless. Additionally, Futabasha and Tentai Books are enthusiastic about collaborating on new titles once these stories have been brought to light.

2. Addressing Delays and Communication

I greatly apologize for the delays that have impacted our release schedule this year. To address this issue, I’ve decided to adopt a new approach. We will now announce book releases a couple of weeks before they become available for pre-order on the various platforms we distribute through. This change will help us manage expectations more effectively and ensure a smoother release process.

3. Technical Updates and Translator Team

Efforts are underway to upload our books to various platforms, including BookWalker and Kobo. Please be patient as we navigate technical challenges, especially with the multiplatform system we use. I assure you that we are committed to ensuring accessibility to our titles worldwide.

I am pleased to announce the addition of two dedicated translators to our team. One is focused on “World Teacher,” while the other is finalizing “Sister Kiss.” A third translator will soon join to exclusively handle “Toxic Girlfriend.” World Teacher is uploaded for preorder, and once it appears in stores as so, we’ll notify everyone of this.

3. Physical Releases and Refunds

I regret to inform you that there have been delays in the production of physical copies for Ice Queen 2, Seatmate 2, and You Like Me 2. We are working to bring these to you, and I will communicate more information as we approach their release. If you have purchased physical copies and are awaiting a refund, please reach out to us at tentaibooks@gmail.com so we can expedite the process. I am sending mails too, but sending us a mail directly will make sure your refund happens faster.

I sincerely hope that this update sheds light on our current status. While these developments may come as a disappointment, we remain committed to releasing our current titles and make things right before delving into further licensing. I will strive to make these more frequent as time passes, even if information about them is meaningless to some.

On a side note, I’ll make small posts to summarize our meetings with our partners later down the line, once we’ve met all of them.

Thank you for reading, and see you next time,

Alex

Hey there, everyone. Alex here with another short blog post to update on current titles and releases.

We have been diligently working behind the scenes, ensuring that our upcoming light novels come out with the usual quality of translation that’s expected of us. From physical designs to release dates, we have a lot to cover. So, without further ado, let’s dive right into the latest news!

  1. Release Dates:
    I’ve personally had my hands full with physical designs and production for next month, so the highly anticipated volumes of Side Character 4 and Give yourself a hand, Sensei! 2 are set to hit the shelves on June 9th. We know you’ve been eagerly awaiting these releases, and we’ve been working tirelessly to ensure they live up to your expectations.
  2. Physical Designs and Approvals:
    Over the past month, we’ve been fully immersed in the intricate process of perfecting the physical designs for our recent releases. The wait is nearly over! The designs are almost done, and we plan to open preorders and start production next month. We’ll also be restocking current titles on our distributors’ platform as well, since we pretty much ran out of books over in the US. To be specific, these physical releases are: World Teacher 2, Ice Queen 2, and Seatmate Killer 2.
  3. Exclusive Bookmark Designs:
    In our ongoing quest to add that extra touch of magic to your reading experience, next week, we will be unveiling special bookmark designs for each of our recent releases. Stay tuned for another blog post dedicated to showcasing these delightful additions.

At Tentai Books, we remain committed to providing you with captivating narratives, breathtaking artwork, and unforgettable reading experiences. The upcoming releases of Side Character 4 and Dirty Sensei 2, along with the stunning physical designs, serve as a testament to our dedication.

Any questions regarding anything, you can reach out to us through twitter or Discord.

Alex
Head of Tentai Books

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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!
  3. We’ll be more focused on marketing our products (which has been kinda non existent for the existence of the company).
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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

Hey there everyone! Alex here with some news about what’s going on, and our plans for the future.

First of all, I want to publicly apologize for what has transpired this year in general with Tentai Books. There have been delays related to pretty much… everything, to say the least. However, my intention is to not only be committed to fixing these issues, but to be open and explain the reasons behind these delays so everyone knows what’s going on.

First of all, to get it out of the way. Personally, this hasn’t been a good year for me. I’ve gone through multiple tragedies within my personal life, and I have this big issue: whenever I feel stressed or heavily pressured, I tend to neglect duties and other commitments that I should honestly be working on, such as shipments, translation, and other kinds of work. I am the main reason for this slog, and I sincerely do want to apologize for the radio silence these past few months.

The second and most important:  the new series carried a massive workload that I didn’t account for, and one that has been overwhelming me over the past few months, specifically related to the production of physicals regarding these new titles — Our new deal with the distributor has been a godsend to us, but the requirements we’ve been required to fulfill in terms of inventory have been a massive undertaking, and between the multiple delays from our printing partner in the USA and the new price hikes, it has dealt a massive economic blow to us. 

Fortunately, the shipments finally arrived last week, but a process that should’ve lasted two months at most has been dragging itself on for six, and that obviously not only is a bad look on our distributing partners and their trust in us, but most importantly, a loss of trust placed on us by our customers, those who purchase our products in our website, and for those delays and the ones that are still in place for shipments, I profusely apologize.

After experiencing this situation, I’m personally making sure to enact some very needed changes in our policies from now on, as well as making some very needed changes in our dynamic as a business.

  1. Our priorities right now lie with:
    1. Making sure customers receive their products.
    2. Preparing new titles to release.
    3. Regain everyone’s trust in us.
  2. Our focus regarding new licensing will be different. We’ll be reducing our simultaneous series to just two, at most three. For this to happen, we’re focusing on completing some of the series & books we have lingering at the moment, those being Ice Queen 2, World Teacher 2 & 3, Diner 3, You Like Me 2, Sister Kiss 2, 3, 4, and Side Character 4, and 5. We’re currently not actively licensing and we will not pursue new titles until we clear the ones we currently have.
  3. To prevent physical preorder issues, we will no longer issue physical preorders of our books until they are already produced and ready to ship. This will mean that the delay between digital and physical releases will widen, but this is done to ensure better products and better customer service.
  4. We’re in the process of looking for someone who can take care of our social media and communications, so everyone can stay updated.
  5. We’re in the process of building a new website, with better functionalities than the one we currently have. 
  6. Last but not least, we want to add our books to all platforms consistently, along with adding new ones such as apple books. This will be done ASAP.
  7. We have a new support mail, as the one we had until now hasn’t been working properly for many weeks. It’s “support @tentaibooks.jaqueasesores.es” Send all inquiries there from now on.

Like we mentioned in a previous post, it is still our intention to apply consumer-friendly policies, such as the free digital access to our books if physical copy is purchased. (We intend to apply this once the new website is up).

As for upcoming releases this year, over the next week we’ll be pinning down exact dates, but just to make things clear, our intention is to release over the course of this year and early next year (these titles are either completely ready for release, or close to be completely ready):

*All these dates are for digital releases.

Regarding Toxic Classmate, we’re in the process of negotiating future volumes, but our partner will not handle subsequent volume rights to us until we release some of the titles previously listed. Apologies for this delay in particular.

To close this post, I mainly wanna touch on our unwavering commitment to offer the best quality physical products and translations, thus we will also make sure that, once things stabilize and titles have been released, we become a company that focuses more on quality releases instead of fast ones, to ensure the best experience for those who read them.

If you have any questions to the team or me personally, we’re available on the Tentai Books Discord, and soon enough actively on all social media as well.

Have a good one!

Adam here. This is a short follow-up to our last blog post with the latest developments.

Release?

After many delays, we’re ready for the next chapter of the trials and tribulations of Dennis, Atrielle, and the whole crowd at the Outcast’s Restaurant! Welcome to the Outcast’s Restaurant! Volume 2 is releasing on June 13th! Just a small reminder that this is a digital only release and does not have any physical release planned.

General update and editor tests

On that note, we are going to be focusing internally on digital releases as a part of our plan to increase the pace and consistency of releases. This focus will not impede or delay the release of physicals; it will instead allow us to release volumes digitally as soon as there are ready.

For those waiting, editor tests have been reviewed and the results will be shared with those who applied shortly.

Hello, it’s Adam again, with an update on the current status here at Tentai Books.

Update on releases and shipping

First off, there are some delays in printing due to the supply shortages that have been affecting the world at large. The next print-run is scheduled for the end of May, and we are expecting to begin shipping soon after.

Speaking of shipping, there is a backlog of orders that are awaiting this print-run’s completion before they can be shipped. Demand has been greater than expected, and our previous stocks have run out on some books and are low on others. Recent pre-orders are also waiting on the same print-run. Titles that I know are definitely affected include: I Kissed My Girlfriend’s Little Sister Volume 1, and You Like Me, Don’t You Volume 1.

On the digital side of things, we are still progressing on multiple projects. Translation is presently ongoing on several titles and complete on others, one of which is awaiting editing. We’ll post a more comprehensive update on progress in the near future.

Editing tests

Editing tests have been sent out and are making their way back to us. Reviews are planned for the first week of May, with selection soon after. If you’ve applied, received a test, and have not gotten it back to us, please do so as soon as you can.

Preliminary news about changes to customer support

Starting now, we are moving support exclusively to email. An increasing number of support requests and other messages on both Discord and Twitter are being missed. Alex, who presently handles all support for Tentai Books in addition to his other duties, has requested this change to allow him to stay more organized and make sure no support requests go unnoticed.

To further help work through the backlog that has built up from this and make sure we get to all requests, I am currently working on a system to allow support to be split between multiple people, and allow greater organization and tracking of requests. Please be patient while this is put in place: I hope to make a post in the coming days with more info.

Lastly, Alex and I both apologize deeply for those support requests that have slipped under-the-radar up to now, and pledge to make sure this never happens in the future.

Hello everyone, Alex here with a short update about what’s going on with Tentai Books and some updates about preorders, releases, etc. I intend this to be a short one but concise at the same time.

PREORDERS

First and foremost, preorders for “Imokiss” and “You like me don’t you” are going up today, for both digital and physical versions.

“Imokiss” is scheduled to go out digitally tomorrow (15th of March) while “You like me” is scheduled for the 29th, with a small delay of a month for the physicals, which means that the physical versions will be released from our store the 15th and 29th of April respectively.

Many of you have already noticed, but others not yet, and I want to make sure to point out that our physical books are now accessible through Amazon, Book Depository, and many other retailers. They’ll soon come to physical stores as well, which will happen around next month. If you have a preference of preordering / purchasing our books there, be sure to do that.

The preorders through our store will remain with the exclusive extras, only available here, in the Tentai Books store.

Sister Kiss will contain these extras if you preorder through us.

You like me also has extras, but they’re still in production phase and won’t be revealed until later down this month.

WORLD TEACHER

Many people have been asking about this title, and we’re picking up the slack. At the very least we’d like to release two more volumes this year (they’re in the works) and we want to push for a third if possible, but I can’t confirm if this will be the case.

ABOUT INTERNATIONAL ECONOMY SHIPPING CHOICE

Ever since I took down the economy choices I’ve been looking into the places where packages have been lost the most. Surprisingly enough, more than 90% of the losses happened with packages destined to the US, Canada, and India. Therefore, we’ll introduce the economy shipping choice once more for international packages, excluding these three countries previously mentioned for the time being until we can find a proper solution to the problem.

Just to be clear, most of the packages tend to arrive, but we don’t like that 5-7% of our customers end up having their package lost, creating a negative experience for everyone.

On a side note, we’re also working on lowering the prices for premium shipping to the US. Currently they stand at a flat 25 USD, but the goal is to lower it to 15 USD over the year.

Along with the economy option returning we’re also going to update our terms of service over packaging, making more clear what will happen in the rare case a package is ever lost again so both customers and us have clear guidelines to follow in case this happens. (Eg: eligibility to send a second package in case one has been lost / a mistake has been done on our end, etc…)

That’s pretty much everything for the time being. See you on the next one.

Alejandro de Vicente Suárez

Hello, Adam here with a short update. There’s been a noticeable lack of public-facing updates over the last month; this is due to circumstances that have, up to this point, been beyond our direct control.

Those of you who are on our public Discord will likely have seen a short post mentioning that we are dealing with a personal emergency that is causing some delays. Among other things Alex has been dealing with some health issues and has had to be in the hospital for a while, thus the low activity and, unfortunately inevitable, delays of physical production since he directly manages that. He’s getting back to work now and is catching up to what has been a busy month for the team.

Several things are happening over the coming weeks

  1. Ice Queen physical preorders will be opening up tomorrow Monday, August 30th.
  2. We are announcing the release date for Seatmate Killer volume 1 and Outcast’s Restaurant volume 2.
  3. Fixed EPUBs are being uploaded to Kobo so those will be up to date with the other storefronts. These updates include Ice Queen releasing on Kobo; something which many of you have inquired about.

On top of that, we haven’t been sitting still. We’ve been busy finalizing assets for the license announcements that we teased back in July (we haven’t forgotten) and have been progressing through translation, editing, and starting initial QA on them. We’re just waiting for final approval from Japan before we announce the licenses and the winners of the contest. You can expect releases to follow a shortly after. All of this means that we will be more active in the coming months.

Thanks to everyone for your ongoing support. If you’d like to interact with us or have any questions feel free to join us on our Discord server discord.gg/QEYncHq or send us a tweet @TentaiBooks.

Alex

Hi there everyone. I’m Alex, and even though I’m the one opening this blog post, I’m not going to be the one writing the main body of it. The short version from my end is that we have a new project manager, new members, and we’re committed to having faster releases moving forward. Although I mainly act as an administration person now, I still work in translation (Side Character) so expect to see my work in the future as well, though not as much!

Adam

Hello, I’m Adam Mousir (Agent_adam99); you may recognize me as one of the QA team members here at Tentai Books. I’ve recently taken up the responsibility of Project Manager and am looking forward to assisting in this expanded role.

I’d like to start by thanking everyone who has been supporting us throughout the last year. It’s been incredible seeing the enthusiasm, support, and feedback we’ve received in this short time. Also, I’d like to say thank you to the rest of the team at Tentai Books for their amazing work and the support I’ve received in settling into this new position.

As was mentioned in the previous blog post, the feedback we’ve received has consistently praised the quality while also pointing out the slowness of releases. Over the past couple of months a lot of back-end work has been done to reduce these delays while also further increasing the quality. It’s a slow process but recently some big steps have been taken toward this goal: one of the biggest being the addition of several translators and a new editor who have joined the team. You may have noticed some of these new members hanging out in our public Discord server over the past weeks. Please take the time to welcome them.

Now for some updates!

How to Melt the Ice Queen’s Heart

Ice Queen recently received an additional translator so Alex can focus on his other tasks while allowing work to continue on this. Our current plans are putting the release date sometime in mid July but we are trying to see if we can get it out earlier then that.

Welcome to the Outcast’s Restaurant

Volume two is almost here! Translation, editing, and copy editing are complete and we are in the process of image editing and typesetting. This has one of our new translators and our new editor, so look forward to their excellent work next month!

Turning the Tables on the Seatmate Killer

Translation is almost done and editing is starting very soon. Once again this project has a new translator and our new editor working on it.

New designs for physicals

The new designs for our physical releases have arrived. They feature a tri‑fold design that allows multi‑page images to bee seen in their full glory.

https://twitter.com/TentaiBooks/status/1405851802453618689

We have also started working on our currently unannounced licenses and are going to be telling you what they are next month. All of these projects have staff assigned and work is starting on them. All three of these will have their hints dropped before the end of this month.

Many of you have pointed out that our release calendar is out of date at this time. We are aware of this and are going to do an update around the end of July.

Lastly, talks with Ingram have wrapped up and availability in Amazon.com, Book Depository, and US retailers should start in September! We know many of you have been waiting for this and we’re happy to announce that it is happening. Other retailers in Canada, and Australia should become available in the months following.

Thanks once again for your support!

Until next time, Adam

Hi there everyone! I’m Alex, and I’m here with an update about what’s going on here at Tentai. I haven’t been very active on social media recently, but for a good reason (doing lots of stuff right now). I’ve been working on a lot of quality of life improvements to our physical system (hence me taking extra time with Ice Queen’s translation). I’ll talk about everything in this post, so here goes.

Ice Queen Status

Currently we’re still working on some things of Ice Queen. We’re coordinating ourselves with the new printer, and once they give us a time estimate for the prints to be done, we’ll give a specific release date. Please, do not trust the Amazon release date, as it is not final and may change depending on the answer of the printer (should come soon). With our new printer physical books should normally arrive a week or two at most after the digital release, just to give an estimate of their arrival.

Side Character 1 Prints

We’ve reworked the design of the cover and softcover for Side Character 1’s physicals, as we’re on track to reprint the physical books due to their recent spike in popularity. I’ll post the initial designs here, but these might be subjected to some small changes in the final version!

Imagen
Softcover Design
Imagen
Cover Design

We’ve also made some critical interior designs for all our upcoming reprints, ones that we will replicate for all future Light Novels we work on. The colored images, instead of being in singular pages, will now be placed in trifold brochure-style, just like the Japanese versions as I will show now:

I apologize for the angle of the video!

These changes we’ve made for both volume 1 and 2 of Side Character at the moment, and we’ll continue to implement this way of showing the colored images in the future. We’ve also fixed the margins and other interior designs of volume 1.

For those who bought the 1st edition of Side Character with the different spine, we’re working on a system that allows the buyer to acquire a softcover of the reworked volume 1 version if they so wish free of charge with any physical purchases in our store as a way to thank those who supported our very early stages of physicals.

Shipping Options Expanded

We’ve been scouting some reviews about our products and service, and generally those that we’ve seen about the quality of our books (and bookmarks!) have been very positive and encouraging! However, what we’ve noticed more than anything else is something that people have been telling us about, that being:

“Their products are of great quality, but their shipping is simply too slow / not the best”

That’s why we have decided to expand the shipping options in our store. Once we restock the physicals in reprints everyone will be able to choose what method of shipping they’ll get. I’ll list the main options available:

  1. Economy Shipping: This is the one we’ve been using so far for all of our physical orders. Although it is very cheap and affordable for everyone, these take quite some time to arrive (between 15 to 40 days), they have no tracking number, and even though all arrive, we understand the concerns of those who buy from our store and have to wait for their package to arrive without any information about its location. Currently these cost around 4 USD for Worldwide shipping and 3 USD for European shipping.
  2. [New Option] Premium Shipping Standard: New option available for buyers. It’ll cost 15€ (or 18 USD) flat for US, Canada, Australia, and EU orders (might vary for other countries a little bit), but it will always cost this regardless of the amount of books ordered (unless it reaches a certain threshold, then this becomes free shipping). This option has tracking number, and takes around 3 to 4 days to arrive anywhere in the world. The company taking care of these shippings is Zeleris, a Spanish shipping enterprise. We’ve personally used their services multiple times, and they’ve proven to be a trustworthy and reliable shipping partner.
  3. [New Option] Other Premium Choices: We’ll add other premium shipping choices in case anyone wants their books to be sent by any other agency of their choice, but these will be fully priced (as a spoiler, the cost for a single-book shipping would start at 30 euros, ouch).

As a way to close the shipping options, although we do understand that the new premium alternatives are punishing for those who buy single volumes, we’ve done our best to make those options worth for those who order more than 1 book through the system, and we hope that we can keep improving the pricing in the future!

As for the presence of our books in Amazon US, BookDepo, and other US, Canadian, and Australian retailers and bookstores

We’re in talks with Ingram to have our books distributed with them throughout the American and Australian continent, as well as having them listed in many other sites and physical stores. It takes a little bit of time to get integrated into their system though, so please bear with us on this one! As soon as we have some news about this we’ll keep updating everyone about it.

And I think that’s it! As an extra, I’d like to add that soon enough we’ll announce Outcast’s Restaurant 2’s release date, as well as another one for Side Character 3.

PS: Expect the remaining announcements of our remaining licenses too as well, as things are moving forward!

Alex.

Hi there everyone! It’s me, Alex. I’m writing this to keep everyone updated about what’s going on in Tentai books. There’s a lot of everything in this one, so buckle up!

First of all, just as a quick recap, we announced our new license on our stream the past 26th of February, called “How to Melt the Ice Queen’s Heart.” The planned date of release is the 30th of April, and we will prepare preorders for Amazon and other platforms soon.

English Physicals for Side Character 2 and World Teacher 1

I have some bad news for these two, but nothing too bad. We’ve had to make some last minute changes to the design of both books, and because of this we will delay their shipping day exactly one week from the 26th of March (to the 2nd of April). We’re sorry for this short delay, but the design change was critical, and we think it would’ve affected reading experience.

I understand that there hasn’t been a lot of info related to the specifics of these books, so I will try to be as open as possible about their contents:

  1. Side Character’s 2 physicals will contain the extra stories issued for this volume. It will also contain 2 sets of bookmarkers, as we didn’t make them for the first volume and we want to give back to those who already supported its release and would like the unique bookmarker for it.
  2. World Teacher will contain a special bookmarker, and as there were no extra limited stories issued in Japan, we haven’t been able to include them in the physicals.
  3. Side Character 2 will keep the same design as the first volume in English, there will be no changes.
  4. Both volumes will have the same size (148mm x 210mm). Side Character 2 has 193 pages and World Teacher around 300 (It weighs almost 400 grams! That’s a heavy softcover alright!). The paper quality will be the same as the one of the first volume of side character despite our printer change.

I will append the designs for the bookmarkers below:

From right to left, Side Character 1 Bookmarker, World Teacher 1 Bookmarker, Side Character 2 Bookmarker

*The size of the bookmarkers will be 52mm x 210mm. The material used for the bookmarkers will be the same material used for the covers of the books. We plan for all of our future physicals to contain bookmarkers.

As for other news, we have decided to unfortunately also delay the announcement that we had planned for the 1st of April. It pains us to do so, but we need a final approval from the company who we licensed from. We thought we would’ve received it by now, but things have been kind of slow. As a way to give back, we will plan a future day to announce the license soon, but we’ll announce two licenses in a day instead of one. I’m very sorry for this delay!

Enough bad news in any case. It’s high time I give some good ones, right? This one is huge too, and a big win for both us and potential / current readers!

We’ve closed a deal with a pretty big book distributor in Spain, called “Azeta.” What does this mean for physical book English readers in the coming months?

  1. All of our physical books will be listed on BOOK DEPOSITORY and AMAZON.COM listings. If you’re an individual who wants our books through your local bookstore or get it for yourself in the US, you’ll just have to ask and they’ll be able to access all of our works through the Amazon or Book Depo listings. Same goes for any EU citizen who wants to access our books through either their local bookstores, Book Depo, and many other websites listing our books that we’ll gradually add to our web’s physical buying options.
  2. Lower shipping times: as these new options open for customers, so does the shipping time for our books. It’ll be taken by these third parties, and thus it’ll take way less for them to arrive at your doorstep. You can still order through our website, but at the moment we offer rather slow shipping, and if you’d prefer a faster option for the time being we highly recommend ordering from the other platforms. Every form of support we appreciate! We’re also working on providing premium options for those who still want to support us through here, so stay tuned for that!
  3. Amazon Shipping (including options for those who have PRIME shipping).

That’s pretty much everything. If you have any questions be sure to reach us through our Discord or any other social media!

Alex

Hello, everyone. I’m Alex, and today I want to bring you guys something different from my usual status updates. Today I’m bringing a translated update directly from Side Character’s author, Sekaiichi. He uploaded this on his writer profile in the website Shousetsuka ni Narou, where Side Character’s story was born!

Before delving into the update, a couple of things should be clarified so as to avoid misunderstandings:

22/01/2020

Hey hoooo! Hooohoho!

Hey guys! It’s me, Sekaiichi, better known as Manaka Gouya, your friendly, super cute, big-chested, and hottie extraordinaire 24 year old high schooler! (*’ω’*)

Sorry for making you guys wait! I’m here for another update related to Side Character, this time related to its soon-to-be manga serialization!

The first episode of the manga will be released the 22nd of February of 2021. It’ll be part of the monthly magazine Manga Yonkoma Palette, released by Ichijinsha!

Everyone knows that Yonkomas are comedic short comic strips of four panels only, but I swear Side Character will have a classic manga structure. Definitely more panels, I swear! (*´σー｀)エヘヘ

The mangaka who will be taking care of the series is none other than Harumare Sensei! The girls he draws are the cutest, and the guys he draws are super hot! You should see his version of Yuuji, he looks really menacing! I feel like the final product will be extremely entertaining, so please check it out if you can whenever it goes live!

By the way, I’ve seen that the Japanese physicals for Side Character Volume 4 have been released in some parts of the country, so if you happen to spot them don’t miss the opportunity and get one for yourself! I’d be so happy if you did! (*´σー｀)エヘヘ

I still intend to keep updating my other ongoing online series over here as well! I know it’s been like six months since I last updated “I review-bombed my cute classmate’s novel and she confessed her love to me in return?!” and ten months since I last updated “No one else but me knows how the student council’s president, a so called ‘perfect girl,’ is actually a disaster of a person,” but I updated them this week if you wanna check those out! I plan to update these either once a week or at the very least twice a month until I finish them both. It’d make me SUPER happy if you’d read them! (*´σー｀)エヘヘ

For those of you who’d prefer me to be more active regarding “A super cute girl has been stalking me for a while, and it’s kinda unsettling,” considering I started that one not so long ago and it’ll be a while before I completely finish the story, I’d rather not update it for the time being.  (´;ω;｀) For those of you who have been patiently waiting for this one, I’m sowwy (´;ω;｀) I ask you to be a bit more patient, nothing would please me more (*´σー｀)エヘヘ

That’s about everything. See you guys around! ♡

Sekaiichi

Hi everyone! Alex here, and here I am again writing a short blog post to keep everyone updated about what’s going on!

First of all, I want to thank everyone who attended any of the streams we participated in. It was our first time trying the platform, so we’ll get better as we keep doing it, we promise!

Anyways, let’s get down to business, shall we?

As we mentioned in those streams, we’ve decided to license World Teacher! Some people are still confused about how we will release this title, so I will give all the details regarding the English version of the book! We have the preview site up, so you can check it here!

  1. The book will be released Digitally and Physically.
  2. We release Digital before Physical.
  3. Physicals will come one month approximately after the Digital version is released.
  4. The release date for the first volume is still undecided, but we hope to have the digital come out by mid-december.

Since this is the first title that offers us the possibility of doing different covers for both our dust cover and the actual cover, this will be the first license where we try that avenue and have double covers for the physical version.

We’re also inquiring to our Japanese counterparts about the extra stories. We don’t know if they exist right now (this book came out in 2015, so they might have been lost for all that we know), but if they do we’ll make sure to make them available in the physical version, just like what we’re doing with Side Character’s physicals!

And speaking of those, we’re very close to start production for Side Character’s Volume 2 Physicals! We’re uploading the digital version as I’m writing this blog, and we’re hoping we can have it ready for preorder this week, so it can be available by the mid-end of this month.

We’d like to have them around a month after the release of the digital versions, but unfortunately Madrid (the zone we’re located in) has been locked down once more due to recent events regarding the coronavirus spread, so delays might happen. We hope you can understand the situation if we have to delay the physicals at some point. For now we think of it unlikely, but we mention it just in case to keep everyone updated on our situation.

And that’s about everything! I hope we can see each other again soon in another update!

Hi there! I know it’s been a while since we’ve posted an update through here and I apologize for that. Nothing very outstanding has been going on lately, so I wanted to wait until I had a bunch of stuff to say all at once.

First of all, I want to thank everyone for their support on our first two series! I personally wasn’t expecting Side Character to gather so much support, but it looks like people are thirsting to have more romcoms licensed, so that’s something I’ll keep in mind!

As far as we observed, we’ve seen that what most people on Europe have been itching to get our books through BookDepo, and while that is currently not a possibility for us since the Covid pandemic has slowed down a lot of the negotiations, we’re planning to lighten the shipping costs to all of Europe to zero in the close future and for future novels to see if we could offer that nice alternative while BookDepo is not available. Stay tuned, we’ll make an announcement about it soon!

We’ve also received very good feedback from those who have bought physicals, and we’ll keep it in mind for our upcoming releases. Apparently their quality is pretty high, so we hope we can keep that standard or make it even better if possible! If you have any suggestions for us be sure to contact us through our mail (support@azure-studio.net) or discord server, I tend to be online over there quite a bit!

Now for some updates on series we’re currently working on:

Side Character 2

We’re currently working on Side Character Volume 2. Initially we estimated the time of arrival of this book to be mid September (14th if I remember correctly), but unfortunately the book data arrived a little bit later than expected, and thus we’ll have to delay the release of the digital version until October.

Regarding its physical version, we’re working on its new design, and we’ll reveal it soon! Since it’ll most likely be radically different from the one that we did for the first volume, we’re planning a reprint of the dust covers for the first volume with the new design, so those who have already bought it have no issues with the difference in designs.

Diner of the Exiled 2

We’re currently negotiating the continuation of this series, hopefully we can give some more news about this soon!

Now, regarding Q4 and what’s going on behind the scenes:

As I mentioned some months ago in another blog post, we’re in the process of licensing new series for our expanding roster of works. Currently we have one new license in the works, and we’re working on acquiring three more hopefully by the end of this year. Our goal is not to focus on a single genre, but at the same time not overextend ourselves with too many genres that could confuse the people who follow us. Our main focus is, and will be Fantasy and Romcom, and that’s how we’d like it to stay for the time being. These choices will be reflected on hopefully all of our new licenses whenever we announce them.

Since we’re still preparing this “new license” I just mentioned, I can’t say exact dates, but we will organize a small Twitch stream to announce it. We’re preparing a lot of stuff for it, so hopefully we can make the announcement by the end of September. Just as a heads up, we are planning to do physicals for this new one as well as digitals. And no, it is not a Romcom, for those who are wondering, but it’s pretty cute nonetheless!

For the other three licenses still in process of licensing, with some luck we’ll announce those in December, and from there on out stay put with 6 series at the same time, since it’ll be a good way for us to (hopefully) keep a monthly / bimonthly pace between releases, so we can provide you with a stream of content without having to wait too much!

And that was everything for this month! Hopefully it was something that got you excited for our upcoming plans! I certainly am, at least!

See you guys in the next update!

Alejandro de Vicente

Hi everyone! I’m Pomelo, the editor at Tentai Books, and I’m in charge of today’s blog post!

I’m sure everyone remembers our previous post where we said our upcoming book, “Welcome to the Diner of the Exiled!” (which I’ll be shortening to just “Diner”) would be released on July 15th. Unfortunately, we’ve had to delay the book. The release date has now been pushed back to July 31st. A few unexpected hurdles popped up, and we wanted to take the time to focus on a proper translation. We apologize for the delay, but hopefully the quality will make up for it!

Just a reminder that Diner will be available digitally on almost every platform. We’re finalizing some details with Book Walker, but it’ll be available on Amazon, Google Books, and more. Of course, you can always buy it directly from our shop too!

We apologize for the delay and any inconvenience. The pandemic has been hard for all of us, but we’re pushing through it and trying our best to give you great releases. Personally, I’ve really enjoyed working on this book, and I hope you guys will like it too!

Thanks to everyone for your patience and support!

P.S. Expect some good news on our Twitter account tomorrow!

Hi there! Alex here with a new post where I’ll be detailing some updates on how things are going regarding our releases (especially concerning physicals of Side Character and the upcoming release of Diner of the Exiled), plus our future plans.

First of all, we want to thank everyone for the support we’ve received with Side Character’s release, it certainly was beyond expectations! Seeing that so many people liked our translation quality really means a lot to the team, so we’ll keep it up! We’ve also received a lot of comments regarding the issues with the epub file and the mobi version that we released, that’s why very soon we’ll be posting a job entry where we’ll be looking for someone to specifically take care of generating our epub files in the future so this doesn’t happen again. Once we have this person onboard we’ll focus on fixing the current issues with Side Character’s epub too as soon as we can. 

We want to also announce an official date for the release of our next license, that being Diner of the Exiled. Diner of the Exiled will be released in all of your favourite stores the 15th of July! And yes, that will include Google Books and Bookwalker from the beginning this time, we promise!

Speaking of Google Books and BookWalker, Side Character is already available online on the first store (check the link over here, we’ll be updating our product page soon) and will be available at BookWalker very, very soon too! 

The physical production for Side Character is on its way as well! We will delay the preorders a little bit for two reasons:

  1. We want to coordinate with other stores to publish the preorders at the same time if possible.
  2. We want to fix some account issues in our website ASAP.

Now, for other information regarding our future:

We’ve started to look for new licensing opportunities. We’ll be making a specific channel for licensing suggestions in our discord so you can personally tell us what you think we should be aiming for as long as it’s within our scope of possibilities (we’re a small company, so nothing too big, please!). This process takes time though, so we ask for your patience if you wanna see new titles!

We’ve also received a lot of questions regarding the future of our physical releases, and to be honest, that will depend mostly on how the Side Character physicals will perform, but if we see as much support for them as we’ve seen so far we shouldn’t have any issues!

And that’s all for now. Thanks for reading, and see you soon!

Hi everyone! We’re uploading this blog post to give you some updates before the release of Side Character tomorrow. Some good news, some not-so-good news, but it’s to keep everyone up to date!

First of all, we want to reiterate that preorders for our physical versions will begin in our website by next week. We’ve sent the files to the printer, so now we just have to check that the sample they provide to us is fine and we’ll be good to go by the middle of next month if everything goes well. 

Secondly, we’ve had some issues with Google Books. First it didn’t let us upload our epub (even with no errors noted by their epub checker), and after quite a bit we managed to upload the file, but due to us requiring trial and error to find out what was wrong they slammed us with a manual review of the account. They said they’d take max ten days, but we can’t confirm when will they actually let us off the hook, so until that happens we’ll have to delay the release of the digital version in that platform until they review our account. Our sincerest apologies.

We also want to detail the way in which you’ll be able to get your digital copies through our website; you’ll have the option to choose the volume number (just one for now), version of the book (digital or physical, although physical will be unlocked next week in preorders) and language (english or spanish). Once you’ve ordered the product from the shop you proceed to the checkout phase. Once that is dealth with you’ll be provided with the digital files for the digital version of the book. The book will be provided within a ZIP file, which contains different versions of the book (epub, Kindle, Kobo Reader & PDF to be precise) so you can choose either of them to be able to read with whatever device you prefer. It’s important to note that the EPUB file is optimized for portable devices such as phones & tablets, but you can read from your computer the file without any issues too! 

Finally, we’d like to announce a small giveaway for those who’d be interested in getting their hands onto one of our upcoming physical copies of Side Character! Just follow our twitter account and retweet our pinned tweet to have a chance of getting a physical copy once they come out!

We hope you’re as excited as we are for the release tomorrow! Have a nice day!

Hello there! To all light novel fans around the world, we salute you! We’re Tentai Books, the newest localization company in town, and we’re here hoping to bring you new and exciting light novels that we hope everyone can enjoy!

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