Talking to Kuroko
Over the pandemic, I was able to get in touch with Black Lake* Kuroko (黒湖クロコ), an isekai author with a very long history on Let’s Become a Novelist (hereafter referred to as “Syosetu”). If you trace back some of the tags to older entries, like villainness, you might have come across their works as one of the few surviving ones.
Kuroko is a long-time writer with multiple adaptations: some of their works include The Migrant Lady’s Engagement Shock, The work-obsessed magic official who, admired by the hero, keeps working overtime, and The Weakest Rabbit that ended up becoming a beloved Demon King. They’re a self-described hobbyist writer, but they’re also extremely active. Kuroko is also an adaptive writer: they’ve tackled subjects like BL, Ladies, Dukes, Villainnesses, and whose writing experience online preceded Syosetu. In other words, they’re a veteran.
A lot of isekai material is front-loaded on the early 2010’s and beyond, no doubt because of the massive interest in Mushoku Tensei, SAO, etc. However, I reached out to Kuroko because I wanted to see their experiences with publishing platforms a few years before that, what led them to the platform, some changes, and how things have changed.
I also think it’s valuable to get the perspective of people who have been writing for a very long time but in a strictly hobbyist capacity. They’ve been writing longer than some people (possibly some readers here) have been alive.
Probably a play on words, it can also refer to a behind-the-scenes assistant which seems…pretty apropos
Changelog:
2023-10-04: Forgot to add a link to Pumpkin Panic, added now, also fixed some grammatical errors
Originally published 2023-10-01
It’s important to understand that these reflections might not be objectively true; Kuroko wants me to stress that these are based on their experiences, so what they experienced or saw might not reflect broader things. It’s a valuable perspective, coming from someone who was active during the time, but such testimonies can be limited.
I was looking at some of the older otome-style isekai on syosetu, specifically listed as such, and I came across your work. Your work, Pumpkin Panic, seems to be one of the earlier ones around. How did you get started writing these stories?
I first started writing otome game isekai because I liked otome games and was inspired by other works. The one that really influenced me was The world of a pretty tough otome game by Nineko. That was the first otome game reincarnation story I read here. I think this body of work was quite old and influenced by others.
That’s interesting. Were there any otome games that influenced you? Games specifically, I mean.
One otome game that influenced me was Alice in the Country of Hearts for the PC, a love adventure-style game without RPG elements. So, in my mind, otome games are where the protagonist has a lot of agency in changing the story, and I see it as something really to be enjoyed for its storytelling.
One of your earlier works listed is Pumpkin Panic. What inspired you to write that?
I didn’t have any specific reasons. Pumpkin Panic just happened to be the first entry in the Panic series. It’s easy to see why: if you look at the posting date, I wrote something to coincide with the Halloween event.* When you think of Halloween, you think of pumpkins, so I chose “Pumpkin.” Since it was about that sort of turmoil, I added “Pumpkin,” and I wrote it in hiragana because it gives it a more comedic tone, so it made the title look sillier.
At first it was supposed to be just one chapter, but readers kept asking questions about it. So to give it a bit more oomph I changed it to a trilogy and expanded on the Panic lore.
Platforms frequently have events where you publish based on a theme. Sometimes they’re character-driven (“Write about a knight”), genre-driven (“Write a short story mystery”), or time-driven (“Halloween is coming up, write a Halloween story”). The benefit of event-writing is you get more potential exposure, hence more readers.
That makes sense! I hadn’t seen something like Pumpkin Panic, so I wondered how you craft those settings.
Pumpkin Panic was a short story for the Halloween event, so I just focused on a Halloween-like monster. I put that together with an otome game premise I had in my mind for a long time.
What drew you to write isekai?
What led me to write isekai…I think it’s because I liked isekai, and my work revolved around the genre of isekai.
I read a lot of that genre and had much fun with it. I first wanted to write a novel when I was in middle school.
At the time, the works I enjoyed were Tamako Maeda’s Hayou no Tsurugi and Miyumi Ono's Twelve Kingdoms. Both are isekai.
The light novel genre in general has so many stories about other worlds, so it was natural I’d want to write about isekai.
I see. I noticed that, despite being isekai, your works have a wide range of settings. Most isekai I see are fantasy stories, but yours are much wider. How do you decide what kind of world to write about?
Hmm, I want to explain it, but it’s very intuitive, so it’s difficult to explain how I decide.
Throughout my everyday life, I just get thoughts of, “I’d like to see this kind of world,” “I’d like to see this kind of character,” or “This title with this kind of development would be fun” and that sort of thing just lingers in my thoughts.
So I take that material, turn it into a novel, and figure out how to best utilize it; I compose a plot and start writing.
Sorry my answer’s like that, but my stories are really based on mundane things in everyday life.
On another note, I’ve noticed that many isekai characters are male, but are you seeing a rise in female protagonists? Or has Syosetu always maintained a similar gender ratio?
Honestly, I don’t know. I never paid attention to the number of female protagonists. I think the number of works with female heroes with triumphs might have increased since the creation of “Villainness” and “Annulled Engagement” (Konyaku Haki, 婚約破棄) genres. And when works with high points become prolific, similar conventions increase. So maybe the number increased, but I don’t know about the ratio because there male genres have similar popular genres like “Lord” (Ryoushu, 領主) and “Party Breakup” (Paachii ridatsu-kei, パーティー離脱系).
Why do you think that is?
I can’t say for sure whether there are more male protagonists than female protagonists in Syosetu isekai because I can’t verify it, but I prefer to write female protagonists because I enjoy romantic isekai fantasies.
I think part of the dynamic is that male-centric isekai are foremost adventure stories that treat romance as secondary. On the other hand, female-centric isekai tend to be romance stories accompanied by an adventuring setting.
In this sense, shounen and shoujo manga can differ greatly; shounen tends to prioritize adventuring over romance, and male protagonists are the focus. Shoujo, on the other hand, also has adventuring, but they also focus on romance, and the protagonists are female. I think it’s because it’s easier to get into the shoes of the same gender (though I’m not saying that men shouldn’t enjoy girls’ works, but there are more female readers than men). That’s why I write women characters - I write for women.
You’ve been writing for a long time. What keeps inspiring you to write?
My stories are inspired by everyday life. For example, I saw an insurance company flyer and thought, “How would a hero react if I offered him insurance?” I took that image and turned it into a story, and that became a novel.
Sometimes those moments happen when I read a novel, so I’m influenced by other novels as well.
Was Syosetu one of your first platforms?
I started around 20 years ago publishing derivative works* on my homepage. When I wrote original works, it was hard to get people to read them; there were search engines for derivative works, and there was a lot of back-and-forth, but original works were different and search sites weren’t as robust as those for derivative ones.
Around that time, I came across a site known as Let’s Become a Novelist. It was around August 2011: it was getting easier to connect with people writing original works and easier to capture audiences for original works, so I started writing there.
They use the term nijisousaku (二次創作), which just means “secondary production,” but it’s a really broad and flexible term generally encompassing parodic works. Parodic, in this sense, doesn’t mean ‘making fun of’ as it is often used in colloquial english, but it’s more expansive than something like “fanfiction,” which often ties its derivation to stuff that happens in the ‘canon’. For example, you can make the argument (as Halo and Matsutoya does) that works of Hatsune Miku feel like nijisousaku, but they’re not very fanfiction-y since Miku doesn’t have a clear narrative boundary so the boundaries start to get messy kinda fast. There’s a lot of movement around a secondary text, and while my translation of it is not very graceful, I think it’s an important distinction, at least for the sake of this article. I’ll be using “derivative work,” but I just wanted to emphasize that it’s not always clear how, what, or why it’s a derivation.
Writing for 20 years is really impressive. You mentioned publishing on your personal blog, did something like Syosetu exist back then? In the west, we have sites like Deviantart and Fanfiction.net. How were stories published before Syosetu?
I was a high schooler 20 years ago when I started publishing my work, so maybe I might be out of the loop, but the plan was to publish it on your own sites. So, original or derivative works, I posted all of them on my personal site. I think it was a bit after that blog-based fiction started to take shape. But the problem was that blog fiction wasn’t really amenable to serialized fiction, and it was somewhat hard to read.
I don’t know what Syosetu was like in the early days. Maybe it was around before 2000, but finding works back then was difficult, so perhaps it wasn’t too widely used.
However, I think Syosetu is innovative. The whole point is to make it easy to read and write novels, give feedback, and be more focused on visibility than managing a website, so you could focus way more on writing.
I see. I’ve read that a few authors use Syosetu’s tag system when planning out their stories. Do you find it useful?
Hmm, I’ll try to answer your question, but I’m not sure I understand the question. Do you mean whether I research popular tags and compose a story with them?
Yes.
In that case, I don’t research and write what’s trending. But there are moments where I read a novel, its influences, and I start thinking that I’d like to write a story with this kind of setting. Basically, my main source of inspiration is what comes to me in my everyday life.
But for Syosetu, readers are also writers; they’re often in contact with each other, which means they’re influenced by each other and start using similar settings. Also, a lot of the popular settings are written through lots of trial and error. This means if you read a lot, even if the description of the setting is a little thin, it’s still easy to write because the reader’s brain can easily fill in the gaps and complete the story.
But lately, more and more books have been picked up by publishers. Those tend to be books with lots of points.* Stories with high points tend to be more likely to be purchased by readers and works with high points rise up the ranks and can more likely catch the attention of publishers. So some authors with that goal in mind might spend more time researching trends.
Many publishing sites use a point system to determine how to algorithmically recommend popular works. Usually this boils down to some quantifiable number related to amount and quality of feedback, audiences, and overall ratings. Stories that have a lot of activity - both in terms of fans and authors - rise up the ranks, meaning they show up on the front pages more often, meaning they get more exposure. Sites in English like Honeyfeed, AO3, and RoyalRoad have similar algorithms, though they vary in terms of how they interpret activity.
Has your time on this site changed your style as a writer?
I’m not sure I understand. Did you mean changes on the site or me specifically?
Sorry, I meant the former.
I’ll take this as the chance to talk about both.
I think the biggest change in Syosetu is that it has changed from a site about posting your works to a site about becoming a published author.
At first, when authors publish on Syosetu and develop a following, they get publishing deals through Alphapolis. But when you did that, you’d need to delete your Syosetu story and replace it with a shorter digest version, and readers would sometimes criticize that.
Eventually, publishers would contact writers directly, and Syosetu would do these contest collaborations with publishers where if you won one of them, you could be awarded with a chance for publication. The submission process was simple: you just added a tag. Unlike traditional novel publication processes, it was really easy; in the past, you needed to adhere to a word limit and a style, and it wasn’t uncommon that you’d need to print out your entry and submit it. Some publishers would even have detailed instructions asking you to put data on a CD along with your printed manuscripts. So it makes sense the publishing boom happened now.
That said, as the publishing boom happened, Syosetu stopped support for derivative works. It’s probably because of copyright issues. Until now it was mainly a fan site, so when it started to become a serious novelist pathway, it had to deal with copyright issues, so they probably stopped support before any legal issues arose. But that’s just my speculation, I don’t run the site. That’s just how the site has changed over the years.
The ranking system changed as well. By that, I’m referring to the ones where we divide into motifs like Isekai Reincarnation and Villainness and those that don’t.
At first they were ranked by genre. However, it’s speculated that certain types just kept dominating the rankings so specific works just didn’t show up. Eventually Syosetu became a place seen as a site for Isekai Tensei or Villanness. So the issue was that even if a work is good, if readers can’t find it, nobody will read it.
Since being on the rankings means visibility, theoretically, this helps even out the playing field.
There are still cases of people cheating to get on the rankings, and some people would try and game the system by going for genres with easy rankings. Perhaps this is what happens when people start seeing Syosetu as a serious gateway to novel publication.
However, as its association with a gateway to success strengthens, the dream of becoming a published author is becoming more realistic, so I think registrations will continue to grow. With all the manga and anime adaptations, more and more people interested in that sort of thing will be more incentivized to submit their works.
What about your perspective as a novelist?
I feel this site has changed a lot.
My novel writing has changed in the sense that I am more influenced by other works than when I published them on my own, I’m more likely to try out different writing styles, and I’m more readily focusing on reader feedback and readability.
Because I have a lot of readers, I try out a lot of different styles: sometimes it’s first person or third, sometimes it’s only from the perspective of one person, sometimes I shift between three people, or sometimes I write a reincarnation story and other times I write something not related to reincarnation at all. Short stories are especially easy to write, they do well, and they get a lot of feedback, so I use them to hone my skills and find out what audiences like.
And of course, I only write about what I’d want to read or write about.
In your experience, was finding an audience easier on Syosetu than, say, Alphapolis? What about Kakuyomu?*
Well, Alphapolis was a publishing site. I used it, but it was to register what I wrote on Syosetu into Alphapolis.
If you win on Alphapolis, you’d need to remove the published portions to qualify for publication. For a while, Syosetu would host the digest version. However, eventually, during the publication process, you couldn’t publish the digests on narou.
Syosetu became a place for sharing works, not a place to promote commercial works.
After that, deleted content that were no longer allowed on Syosetu would end up on Alphapolis. Currently, it’s possible to post content on Alphapolis, but for me, I don’t because I originally write for Syosetu and I’m a hobbyist writer first and foremost.
For Kakuyomu, it didn’t exist when I started on Syosetu, and I don’t have any issues with Syosetu so I just don’t use it. I post my writings online as a hobby, so I don’t double post to advertise because it gets in the way of my enjoyment of the writing process.
Kakuyomu.jp is a publishing website owned by Kadokawa. One recent adaptation is I Got a Cheat Skill in Another World and Became Unrivaled in the Real World, Too.
I’m sorry, I might’ve misunderstood. Were you only allowed to post stories? How did Alphapolis specialize in publishing?
Sorry, I wasn’t clear.
How Alphapolis worked back then was that you registered an address link of your work to Alphapolis. Then, you put a link generated by Alphapolis on your novel, and if readers liked it, they’d click on it. People can publish works on Syosetu, their home pages, blogs, wherever.
Maybe you could write on Alphapolis at the time? If so, I never saw anyone use it. Nowadays I can’t post my published Syosetu works, but you can write.*
If people click on your link, you get points and get listed on the rankings. If you get a high enough number of points, you apply for publication and then an editor reads and judges your work. Awards are conducted regularly, you register to apply and when you’ve registered, you can fill out an application quite easily.
Until then, submitting something to a publisher was a very tedious process - you’d need the complete work with a word count, printed, and mailed with a profile and a synopsis (and depending on the publisher, they’d want a CD with data). With Alphapolis, there was no word limit for unfinished works, and if the writing style was unconventional, as long as it was popular, it could get published.
For me, I registered on Syosetu because I wanted more people to read it, not because I wanted a pathway to publishing.
It’s also important to note the difference between hosting and referral linking: referral linking has a lot more leeway through Alphapolis. If you’re hosting on their site directly, they have more control on your content. Moon-Led Journey, for example, is one such story that migrated from Syosetu to Alphapolis.
Did you ever read cell phone* novels? They’re not very popular in the West, but I wondered if you had any experience with them.
I didn’t read many cell phone novels, but I think some cell phone novelists went on to become web novelists. If I recall, cell phone novels were a form of writing composed on cell phones and read on cell phones in the days when it was the mainstream.
Now, the number of cell phones is decreasing, and web novels can be read on smartphones, so I think the latter is the mainstream.
I think that cell phone novels became popular among the younger generation because they could and write what they want without it being seen by their parents. I also recall that some of them became so popular they were published in paperbacks. Isn’t that similar to how web novels are published today?
I don’t know how popular they were, but definitely popular enough to be published.
They were called keitai shousetsu (“cell phone stories,” ケータイ小説), which were partly popularized when easy-to-produce hosts like Magic Island and i-mode allowed affordable internet access through mobile phones. Though they aren’t as popular now, cell phone novels were a popular form of mass media content during the 2000s due to their ease of reading, free access, and regular serialization.
Was there anything you’d like me to relay to people that I didn’t ask?
People used to laugh at light novels, calling them vulgar, and now they laugh at “narou novels” as vulgar.
But I think that narou novels written on Syosetu is an interesting development based on readability and exciting developments. This site also has many people who write stories that aren’t just the mainstream stories, but are still called narou novels.
I hope that people don’t get too concerned, find the stories you like, and if you come across something you like, know that you too can start writing.
