Chapter 9

Translated by Seraphic

Loop 28

●Day 1●

Well, another 50,000, huh?

I have to carefully consider my options.

The first thing that springs to mind is increasing the number of chapters.

I started posting on the 50th day and posted 400 chapters over 300 days.

The point growth would have been even better if I had continuously posted twice a day.

I could reach that rate of release by increasing the number of chapters to 600.

After that, I should consider the posting time.

I’ve been updating twice a day, at 9:00 and 18:00.

That was because those times got the highest traffic when I tested it out on day 1.

Now that I think about it, however, this is only indicative of a single day.

It’s possible that it varies day to day.

Perhaps on the second day, 8:00 and 19:00 are better.

There must be a pattern.

Perhaps I should start replying to comments…

Things like thanking readers for their responses and answering people’s doubts.

However, I don’t know about the author of the highest ranked novel, but the 2nd ranked author hasn’t responded to many comments, so it may not be very meaningful to do so.

Maybe I should change the title.

I don’t think “Other World’s Pincer Master” is a bad title necessarily, but I feel like I could name it something more striking.

The synopsis could also be made more interesting to hook readers.

In any case, I’ll do what I can.

It’s only 50,000.

It’s not a small number, but the novel’s reached 300,000, so it should be possible.

But it was all useless.

No matter what, I can’t gather the last 30,000.

Regardless of my efforts, I can’t breach 320,000.

What am I missing?

Do I need to include illustrations?

I can’t draw pictures. The story I can get away with, but I have zero artistic ability.

Starting from zero, without any instructional books or internet, is it possible to produce something that could be shown to the readers?

Well, I have endless time and there’s nothing that’s impossible.

However, thinking about it, most of the top novels don’t have illustrations.

I wonder how much it would matter, in that case.

I don’t get it.

What should I do?

How can I get first rank?

I don’t know.

……I don’t know.

No matter what I did I couldn’t reach 350,000.

[1] The “draw in” part is イカしていて (ikashiteite). イカす is actually a (apparently somewhat dated) slang term that, as far as I can tell, comes from a song in the 1950s…and in this case, does not refer to squid (イカ, as in Ikamusume) as I first assumed.

[2] Here, and in the first sentence of this paragraph, the author uses an idiomatic phrase, ゲタを履いた (geta wo haita) which means “to put a base under,” with the implication you’re hyping up something so that it appears better than it is. “Geta” are those straw/wooden shoes with slats beneath them so that the wearer is raised off the ground. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geta_(footwear)

[3] Japanese is, on the whole, more amenable to run-on sentences than English. I’ve paraphrased this paragraph so it’s not a nightmare to parse.

[4] Some wordplay here, 荒れに荒れた. Perhaps “deserted like a desert” would be a good approximation of the effect, but “deserted” is not strictly an accurate translation. If I were a publisher doing this professionally, I might have chosen that phrase as it was a better portrayal of the tone, but I’ve generally favored sticking directly to the script.

[5] In Japanese, 炎上商法 (Enjou Shouhou), describing a phenomenon where someone counterintuitively uses invective language/trolling to increase their popularity, particularly over Twitter and other social media. Think Donald Trump.

[6] Nearly the same as a sentence discussed in a previous note. Maybe the author wanted to use the line but forgot he already did? Though, in my impression, the writing’s gotten more nuanced as the story goes on, perhaps mirroring the growth of the protagonist as a writer. I might be completely off-base, though, because I’m mainly judging it based on how difficult it is for me to understand.

[7] The literal phrase is “bend the navel”, an idiomatic phrase I haven’t yet found the origin of.