The idea behind light novels was originally easy to read fiction with illustrations, a bit like a comic book with occasional single panels and a lot of text rather than speech bubbles. They got popular in Japan for commuters to read on their phones. In Japan, 99% of commuters are on a train rather than in a car.
It can be seen as an evolution of the style of novel exemplified by Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen, written in relatively simplistic text style with short sentences and so on. This is not to diss the author, who made a conscious decision to write that way. Every novel doesn’t have to be War And Peace.
Obviously, fiction styles drawing heavily on videogame culture are a lot easier to do now than say 30 years ago. I just wonder how many of these “LitRPG” books are AI assisted or generated. And their reviews.
They only have to make more than whatever they were doing before. There are always the flashy outliers (who move quickly to the “how to do what I did” tier of grift) but most of them are probably working full time to scrape a subsistence income producing 3 books a day (the amazon publication limit), with various weakly-policed shenanigans to get around it. The problem is really that Amazon won’t stop it.
One tactic for ebook grifters is to create “spoilers” for real books, i.e. books that will appear in the seach results and get bought by mistake by less computer-literate customers.
For instance, former British prime minister Liz Truss has published a memoir, and here’s a bunch of “biographies” of her that have been churned out to cash in on it.
I guess books by (or at least credited to) politicians were the pioneers of this activity. Convenient way to launder funds and give bribes, so I imagine it may be a minute before Congress gets around to writing any laws killing this golden goose.
There’s alot more than the Harem subgenre of litRPG and AI isn’t more prevalent there than in other genres, as far as I can tell. The litRPG and “Cozy Fantasy” subgenres really seem to be taking-off and are producing some fun stuff, most of it harem and porn-free.
RoyalRoad has plenty of good stuff (and terrible stuff) for free.
That is a series with 5 seasons and 2-3 movies, oh! plus another series about the girl who agrees to help train the protagonist, and it’s darling. There’s a 3-ep. arc or more about the girl he hires to manage his pack (full of weapons and potions etc.) There’s an overarching arch about liqueurs of the gods. There’s a sidebar about the monsters having their own clade. Certainly the odd ep. about the company paying adventurers to do dungeon stuff/getting a cut.
this happens with me sometimes when i try to make dinner. quick! is it okay to pick up red wine for lasagna? yes? no? oh, look i made several seasons of a show based on a novel while you were out at the store
