"Who at the publishing house approved this? Are they out of their minds? Ending chapter seven or nine would have been fine, but they just had to cut it at chapter eight?"
"I feel terrible. Seriously, girls, this cliffhanger hurts so much. Can anyone who followed the magazine tell us what happens next?"
"I'll pay triple the price for the issue of Fleeting Blossoms that has chapter nine of Blue Spring Ride. DM me if you're selling."
"I honestly never expected a Minamijo-based publisher to put out something this good. Can someone local tell me what happens after chapter eight? I'm also willing to pay three times the price."
"I can't sleep tonight. I never paid much attention to Crimson Maple Literature's romance novels before. I only bought the volume because I kept seeing Blue Spring Ride fans recommending it everywhere at night. I admit it, the novel is amazing, but why does it have to end like this? Did the author do this on purpose?"
"Even if Shiori really is that rumored high school girl genius, I still can't forgive this!"
"But is this really her fault? Where a standalone volume ends isn't the author's call, right? That's decided by the publisher."
"I don't know about that. But this novel was serialized first, wasn't it? Which means chapter eight already ended like this back then. So we're not wrong to complain. This is unforgivable."
"I won't be able to sleep tonight. Ever since I finished Blue Spring Ride, my head is full of Kou, Futaba, Yuri, and romance."
"This novel is seriously good, but why does it feel like it isn't famous at all? I think it's better than a lot of nationally famous romance novels. If I hadn't randomly bought it today, I probably would have missed it completely. There was barely any promotion."
"Well, this is a Minamijo publisher after all. They don't have much influence outside the region. How could they afford to heavily promote a standalone volume by a high school debut author?"
On the forum, more than eighty percent of the posters were locals from Minamijo.The remaining twenty percent were readers from other prefectures who had come specifically to post.
This situation caught the Crimson Maple Literature staff responsible for operations completely off guard.
Under normal circumstances, when Crimson Maple released standalone volumes, they were technically distributed nationwide. However, due to the lack of promotion outside Minamijo, sales in other prefectures were usually miserable. If all sixteen other prefectures combined managed six or seven thousand copies, that was already considered decent.
But tonight, the number of out-of-prefecture readers drawn to the Fleeting Blossoms forum because of the Blue Spring Ride was clearly far higher than usual.
Even among Minamijo readers, the number of comments, new threads, thread popularity, and page views had all surged far beyond normal levels.
"It feels like the first volume sales of Blue Spring Ride might exceed the publisher's expectations by quite a bit," a Crimson Maple Literature employee said to himself late at night while reviewing the data.
For light novel standalone volumes, sales are usually measured by first week and first month figures. While the actual sales numbers for Blue Spring Ride were not yet available, this level of discussion alone suggested the results would not be bad.
Yukino, Haruto, and Reina were all paying close attention to the forum discussions about their novels that night.
On the surface, readers were venting their anger about the cliffhanger.
In reality, it proved how strongly the first volume had hooked them.
"What a waste," Yukino sighed softly.
Judging from the feedback to the standalone release, if Blue Spring Ride had been serialized on a stronger platform, such as Starfield Publishing or Clearstream Library, those publishers would have had the ability to promote and distribute the volume nationwide on a large scale.
In that case, Blue Spring Ride might really have become a nationally popular light novel. Of course, this was just Yukino's personal opinion.
Individual taste often diverged from market reality. And as an editor at Crimson Maple Literature, thoughts like these clearly conflicted with the company's interests. She quickly pushed those stray thoughts out of her mind.
Reina scrolled through the forum posts from top to bottom.
More than ninety percent of the threads were discussing Blue Spring Ride's plot. There were very few mentions of Yesterday's Starlight. She could not help but sigh as well.
Late at night, lying on her bed and gazing at the starlight outside the window, she spoke softly to herself.
"Pull yourself together. Work harder. You already know Yesterday's Starlight isn't as good as Blue Spring Ride. What's the point of feeling so down now?"
As for Haruto, his thoughts were much calmer.
"This seems fine. Crimson Maple predicted that the total sales of Blue Spring Ride volume one would be around two hundred and fifty thousand copies. Judging by this level of hype, that number should be achievable," he said while analyzing the data.
There is a fairly stable relationship between a standalone novel's weekly sales, monthly sales, and total sales.
Generally speaking, first week sales account for roughly half of the first month's total. Meanwhile, the first month usually makes up seventy to eighty percent of the book's lifetime sales.
For most normally popular, standard-length novels, you can roughly estimate the final total by taking the first week sales and multiplying them by three.
Of course, this does not apply to long-running series that serialize for years. Those maintain constant exposure and steadily gain fans, so their standalone sales continue to grow.
But for short-to-medium-length novels like Blue Spring Ride or Yesterday's Starlight, which wrapped up in about two months, the popularity only lasted a few months. Their standalone sales naturally would not be sustained long-term.
"For Crimson Maple Literature, if Blue Spring Ride volume one sells over seventy thousand copies in its first week, that's a passing grade. Hitting one hundred thousand would already be excellent. If it reaches one hundred and twenty thousand, that's beyond expectations in the publisher's eyes."
Since first week sales are roughly one-third of total sales, an extra twenty or thirty thousand copies in the first week translates to over a hundred thousand more in final volume sales.
If the series runs ten volumes or more, that difference becomes a matter of millions of copies by the end. In Minamijo, a difference of just a few tens of thousands in first week sales is enough for many people to consider two books to be on completely different levels.
With his thoughts sorted out, Haruto did not dwell on it further. He turned off the lights and went to sleep.
The next day was Sunday.
Chapter ten of Blue Spring Ride was released alongside the new issue of the magazine.
That day, sales of Fleeting Blossoms were unusually smooth. Normally, copies would only sell out by the following day, but many bookstore owners found that their stock was already gone by six in the evening.
Part of this was because readers who had bought the standalone volume joined the ranks of magazine followers.
Another part was due to people seizing a business opportunity. Fleeting Blossoms did not have distribution channels in other prefectures, so out-of-prefecture readers had no way to buy it locally. However, they could simply commission Minamijo locals to buy copies for them and mail them out.
It cost a small service fee and shipping, but that was far better than waiting indefinitely for Blue Spring Ride volume two to be released.
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