I think this is one of the top ten questions that aspiring novelists want to know.
There is quite a bit of irresponsible stuff on Yahoo Chiebukuro. It wasn’t a very helpful answer.
After watching many Youtube videos from various sites and professional authors, I can answer this question.
1，Where can you get the top?
First of all, it is important to ask yourself where the work you are writing or want to write will reach its peak.
Whether you want to win a rookie award or be picked up by a submission site, in both cases, you have to find the “top” of the field.
This fact, when you think about it seriously, is painful. But it’s reality, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
If it’s a newcomer’s award, you have to be the first or the second highest rated work by the judges out of hundreds of submissions (or 5,000 works if it’s a light novel of Japan).
If it’s a submission site, you either have to get the top ranking instantly, or you have to keep gaining popularity over a long period of time and accumulate enough evaluation points to surpass other authors.
In other words, in either case, if you don’t have the momentum to get to the top or come close to it, you won’t be able to become a professional in the first place.
If your work is obviously going to be popular on ” Shosetsuka ni Narou “, then you have to aim for the top ranking on Shosetsuka ni Narou.
If the work you are writing is apparently not popular among web readers, you should aim to win a newcomer’s award.
At the time of writing this article, the Agatha Christie Award winner, Fuyuma Osaka’s “Comrade Girl, Shoot the Enemy” has become a hot topic with its huge sales.
(This original article is in Japanese, so this is a Japanese event.)
He originally serialized the work on Kakuyom and submitted it to the Agatha Christie Award and won.
You say, “I see. That’s amazing.”
No, you’re missing the important thing.
What’s important is the fact that when this author was serializing on Kakuyom, he did not make a debut as a pick-up artist (although he caught the reviewer’s eye), but he applied for and won the Rookie of the Year Award.
In other words, even if your work won the Rookie of the Year award and became a big hit, it was not even picked up by the submission sites.
So, think about whether your work can reach the top of the heap at the submission site or the Rookie of the Year Award!
2, Do you want to make your debut as soon as possible, even if it’s short, or do you want to be active for a long time, even if it’s late?
If your work is picked up by a submission site such as “Shosetsuka ni Narou” (Let’s Become Novelists), it will be published in book form in a shorter period of time compared to a New Author Award debut.
In the case of the New Author Award, it takes six months or longer to get your work selected. From there, the manuscript is reworked according to the editor’s instructions, so it takes a year or more from the time you submit your work until it is published.
When you hear this story, you may think, “How can I be bothered with all that? I’ll just have it picked up by a submission site!”
However, the disadvantage of submission sites is that you become a disposable writer.
In the case of submission sites, the initial investment is small because publishers simply look for works that are likely to sell and convert them into paper books.So, if a publisher feels that a book is not selling well, they will not publish it again. When authors try to publish the next one, the response is often, “Please publish it on the novel submission site again and call me when it gets the top ranking.”
In the case of the Newcomer’s Award, a lot of money is involved in the running costs of the Newcomer’s Award, prize money, and other expenses. (In some cases, more than 10 million yen), so publishers start with a lot of money invested in the work, and they try to make a profit from the author. Even if the book doesn’t sell very well, the publisher will say, “No, he’s a newcomer that we invested a lot of money to discover. I have to get my money’s worth!” And they will release the next one. (Of course, there are limits.)
For this reason, it seems to be a common belief among professional writers that if you want to be active for a long time, you need to win the New Writer Award.
That’s all the information I’ve gathered from the videos and books of professional writers.