Hey all, so I’d like to talk a little bit about book covers on Natively, especially really crusty book covers. A lot of the books I’ve submitted/would like to submit have absolutely awful photos on Amazon as their “cover photo” (generally due to the books being older ones), and I hate for that to be the first thing a prospective fan sees when they click on a series. (Two examples: one, two)
There are also cases where a book has an Amazon page, but no cover or Kindle version to take from, and it kind of dissuades me from submitting it, even though I’d like to. (Example)
What could be some reasonable options for getting higher-quality book covers for these titles on the site @brandon?
I’m totally with you @eefara, I’d love better covers!
Ultimately, I’m not sure how much I can do right now beyond handling one off feedback requests … thank you for all your requests btw will get to them today . Once we have more community editing tools (eventually I plan to allow community-driven content tagging, book summaries, etc) I imagine we could allow editing the cover images too.
Beyond that though, Amazon is without a doubt the best source for images that I’ve found. If you have any other places with better images, do let me know!
I just sent you some random website in feedback but looking into it, both the manga I sent in a better cover for (ウテナ) and @eefara 's previously linked 氷の魔物の物語 have better covers on Bookwalker (1, 2)
So I will mention here that that particular series (+ others from the same author) have very nice ebook covers that are slightly different than the paperback releases. I think @brandon mentioned hesitating in the past about adding ebook-specific covers; might be best to have your opinion here in the comments for reference, though?
I’m going to mention here, since it’s off topic for the original thread.
The free sample ended up as “volume 1” of the series, with “volume 2” being the full version. That seems pretty confusing
Maybe longer free samples should be handled separately? Back when I only read one for a different book, I just marked my status as “stopped” but I guess it might not be satisfying for some. Maybe it should be a specific entry on the book page?
How about if you detect is an image with artifacts/very bad compression/low resolution/placeholder, give a button that says “Suggest new cover” where you can upload a better one?
It’d be nice, but honestly it’s hard . I agree it might irk people if they can’t complete a series without reading the sampler… but obviously some people want to track if they read a sampler. TBH there’s a whole host of supplemental content that makes it into series as separate items (side stories, art books, samplers, short story side story collections…). Eventually we may attempt to demarcate and handle all these things, but will probably just roll with treating everything as a book for the time being
Also, it seems like it can really mess up the database.
For instance, when I added 王子様に溺愛されて困ってます ~転生ヒロイン、乙女ゲーム奮闘記~ | L30, you didn’t pick up the longer free sample. What happens if I add it now? Is the system flexible enough to add it to the series? If yes, in which position? If no, does it mean you have an extra item on the site with the exact same title?
Oh wait, I see. It’s just that in one case Amazon put the sampler in the series, but not in the other case. So they messed up. So I guess that if I added the 王子 sampler in the scenario I just described, it would just appear as a standalone on Natively?
To be clear, we can break this out as a standalone, but that doesn’t feel entirely right either. . Or perhaps we put it at the end of the series and not as volume 1?
Hard to say. Obviously, going with what Amazon is doing is the best option short term (so part of the series of the first example and standalone for the other one). Eventually, I think it should be integrated into Natively, though, as it’s own thing. In particular, when there’s a manga adaptation, they usually have a sample of both the (light) novel AND the manga in the same book. That makes it difficult to grade them the same way as the rest.
I’ll make a request thread tomorrow when I have the time.
I don’t remember hiding these status updates, but even if I did why would three status updates be shown for the same user? This is for 魔法少女育成計画 limited (前) | L36. Seems a bit noisy to show “stale” activity on a book’s page.
Is there a common definition of what separates a novel from a light novel that we’re using here on Natively? When submitting to Natively, I’m never sure what to put for cases where: 1) the book/series is early 2000s (so isn’t obviously part of the recent LN boom in the west), 2) has some illustrative work, and 3) doesn’t seem to be obviously aimed at a YA demographic. I hate to default to “how serious is the book/the content matter”, because you can get some pretty serious themes in YA and goofy stuff in fiction for “adults”.
Heh, Brandon and I have talked about this a couple times because I’ve read (or started to read) a few books that I’m like “surely this is a light novel” (looking at you ドールハウスの人々 | L33 and 屍人荘の殺人 | L33) and looking at Japanese reviews even of 屍人荘の殺人 people are commenting that it seems more like a light novel than a 小説, but ultimately it comes down to what did the publisher categorize it as.
Yeah, I usually go by this. If both Amazon, bookwalker, +other sites categorize it as a light novel, I think it’s safe to just go with what they say. Though, there was one instance (吸血鬼の劣等感 | L31) where I submitted it as a light novel despite it not being in that category on Amazon since the description literally says “ジャンル：ライトノベル”. I do think it’s better to assume novel unless there is evidence otherwise since it would be unfair to consider a book as an LN simply for having an anime-style cover or something like that.
. Once we have more community editing tools (eventually I plan to allow community-driven content tagging, book summaries, etc) I imagine we could allow editing the cover images too.
Hopefully some of the burden can be lifted from you in the future.
