Throw it in the queue 
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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 
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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?
Yes we normally just do whatever amazon does.
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?
Can be persuaded many different ways.
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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.
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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.
Got an extra trailing comma when someone is reading a book but no one has completed the book.
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”.
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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.
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Yeah no strict definition but a good rule of thumb is if it’s on MAL or anilist i usually categorize as an LN 
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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.
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Where does Amazon typically show a genre for a book?
At the top of the page, you can see the main “Category” and its sub-categories. For example, English: Japanese Books›Literature & Criticism›Criticism & Theory or Japanese: 本›文学・評論›評論・文学研究.
Light novels tend to be under 本›コミック・ラノベ・BL›ライトノベル or Kindleストア›Kindle本›ライトノベル. I find it a bit interesting that they group Manga, BL, and LNs together into one mega-category. Girl’s love just isn’t the same I guess…(or probably just not as popular)
Underneath the description, at the bottom of Product Details(
登録情報), you might see additional tags under Amazon Bestseller(Amazon 売れ筋ランキング).
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Oh, if you were asking me, where the genre on that specific book was listed, I meant that it was literally written in, under the publisher description as ジャンル：ライトノベル. That’s not something they typically do. I just realized that might be what you meant.
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Nah, your first reply was what I was looking for! I wasn’t very specific in my quoting. 
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In my limited experience, it seems to be put in the regular light novel box. It seems like publishers consider men to be the default readership of light novels and I guess that they consider yuri to be men-friendly (but not yaoi/BL, so it needs its own category).
To make things worse, I know at least one publisher that describes their book as “ライト文芸”. It’s supposedly better quality than LN (I agree so far) while dealing with lighter content than proper novels. One example is わたしの幸せな結婚 (series) | L32 (listed as novel on Natively)
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That sounds like something made up for people who like light novels but are too insecure to admit that they read light novels. 
“You read light novels. I read light literature. We are not the same.” 
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Why does search show the 8th volume, rather than the 1st volume or the series?
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I’ve seen that happen to a couple of series; @brandon’s been able to fix it so far, but I guess he hasn’t been able to fix the root cause yet?
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