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What's A Light Novel?

animenewsnetwork.com/news/2016-05-29/top-selling-light-novels-in-japan-by-series-2016/.102641

Many of the top selling are battle harem. After the "lost in parallel fantasy world" is the most popular trend in LNs.

And why is animated is simply promotion, promotion, promotion.

The line is more or less:
New LN have good sales.
Make a manga to promote that LN.
If sales are improving, make a anime to promote that LN.
If there is a good improve of LN sales, even if the anime BD's don't sale that much and the anime lost money, a new anime season may follow.

Edit: On the topic of one volume light novels, I offer up Welcome to the NHK.

I was originally very excited when more and more LNs started coming out in the States, until I realized that most of them were... not very good. I was also disappointed to discover that LNs are so "light" in content and so targeted toward the anime market that most of the anime adaptations match the content of the original so closely that if you've seen the adaptation, there's no gain in reading the original. People make jokes about the Lord of the Rings movies being longer than the book, but that actually is the case with most light novels. It took me an hour and a half to read The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya while the movie is 2.7 hours. I'd bet this is consistent if you compare episode run time to the light novel volume equivalents of most series, assuming you're a reasonably fast reader.

Of course, if the anime doesn't adapt the entire series, the light novels provide more story and the incentive to buy them. Personally, I've wanted to continue a few stories but it's such a struggle to get through the volumes covered by the anime I never get to the sequels. I should just skip them... but I'm always worried I'll miss something, even though I should know better by now.

I mostly want to know how all these awful assembly-line made "magic high school battle harem fantasy" light novels get published and animated in the first place. Surely their sales aren't that great, especially after their 14th permutation of the exact same story setup?

Based on those figures, what's the amount of sales for a novel to be considered a wide success for an anime adaptation?
SAO alone from those two on the list is ~800k
How about something like Re Zero or Gate?
Would love to see anime adapations

I like the fact that Light Novels are gaining some popularity in America as it's at least encouraging people to read actual novels and literacy is becoming sadly scarce in this day and age.

The way I generally look at light novels is that they are writings made purely for entertainment purposes, rather than for artistic merit. It's a story written by someone who isn't necessarily trying to tell a cohesive and meaningful story, but has these characters and scenarios that they want to see in print and (lets face it) turned into an anime. Which is why they tend to be lacking in things such symbolism, motifs, foreshadowing (I don't consider pointless prologues foreshadowing), and all that other artsy-fartsy stuff. And also why LN series are just volumes of arcs which don't really amount to anything in the end.

As far as the "poorly-written" part goes, that mostly falls on the publisher. No surprise that they higher random amateurs who write solely to appeal to a target demographic, as I would imagine it is very cost efficient. They probably only pay the author pennies, and I would imagine the publishing house doesn't even edit the work before sending it out into the public.

Of course, this isn't to say that all LNs are bad and they all consist of the flaws I mentioned. But, I think after a certain quality is achieved, it no longer falls under the category of light novel; its considered a [insert genre and sub-genre] novel. The illustration has certainly become a staple in light novels, but I don't think its a defining characteristic. I could definitely see some new adult novels here in the states using manga art :p

As far as the "poorly-written" part goes, that mostly falls on the publisher. No surprise that they higher random amateurs who write solely to appeal to a target demographic, as I would imagine it is very cost efficient. They probably only pay the author pennies, and I would imagine the publishing house doesn't even edit the work before sending it out into the public.

there is also the fact that Light Novels to quote the TV tropes page on it

Quote:

Modern light novels use simpler, easier-to-read everyday kanji as opposed to "hard" novels, which generally contain much older words which, even for Japanese readers, may necessitate keeping a dictionary on hand to understand. The closest parallel in the Western world is probably the distinction between "Modern English", "Middle English" and "Old English".

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LightNovels. So the language is also "lighter" or easier to understand in the original Japanese.