English Light Novels

If you've not read my light novel collection post yet, click here! I mentioned at the end that I wanted to talk about the official English publishers for LNs.

Now an interesting thing to note is that every one of the books I have, aside from the Monogatari series, are published by Yen Press. Yen Press has capitalised on the licensing of most LNs, which is great! I mean, for a company to go all out and license so many LNs (even those without an anime) is an excellent step forward for the international community. Problem is, I believe they may be taking more than they can chew. It's evident by every book I've read from them, there are always typos. The English being basic is a given but having typos is just carelessness. Sure, they are few and far between but enough for me to notice the pattern.

Vertical Inc. on the other hand, is the company that publishes the Monogatari series. They don't have as many LNs under them as Yen Press and they mostly do mangas (Flying Witch being one of them) but their quality is pretty much on point. I should imagine that the Monogatari series is very susceptible to typos and mis-translations but surprisingly, none of these are present in any of the books I've read. Even if a sentence sounds weird, reading it over a few times will eventually shine light on what Nisio Isin actually meant. It's impressive to say the least.

If you have a collection or plan to collect LNs, Yen Press is your best bet. They have almost everything you would want and then some. Every mainstream and non-mainstream LN heads their way and the best way to plan around release dates and licensing deals is to regularly check up on the company (or the respective series). Whatever you or I think of them and their work quality doesn't matter, they're the only ones that can give us what we want.

That being said, the fact that Vertical Inc. publishes the Monogatari series is good enough. You want to read the series? You know who to pay attention to.

Do not worry if you feel that the English licensing comes late to a particular series. The English releases are actually fast-tracked so as to keep up with the Japanese release until they're both near simultaneous. It's the reason why, for example, the first volume of KonoSuba was released in February and in April, the next two are coming.