Last year, Visual Arts, the company behind Clannad and Angel Beats development studio Key, launched its “Kinetic Novel Awards” contest, aiming to discover new talent in the fields of novel writing, illustration and music. The new round of winners was announced in January this year, with one of the awards being a chance for novelists to have their works published physically, as visual novels or even as anime. However, as reported by ITMedia News, on October 20, Visual Arts suddenly announced that they will be terminating adaptation rights for some of the winning works in the novel category.
The Kinetic Novel Awards contest was launched by Visual Arts in a collaborative effort with Shosetsuka Ni Naro, Japan’s biggest self-publishing website hosting over a million different novels. It was first held in 2020, and it welcomed its 10th round of winners this year. But in an unexpected turn of events, it was announced that adaptation rights contracts have been terminated for a total of 21 winning works. Visual Arts also stated that the rights have been returned to the respective authors of the affected novels.
Additionally, the company clarified that the reason behind the contract termination was not due to circumstances on the authors’ sides, but because of Visual Arts’ own “poor prospects for realization of the works.” Considering many of the affected works (predominately in the isekai genre) have been awarded in previous years with no actual progress when it came to proper publishing (the oldest one receiving the award as far back as 2021), Visual Arts explains that they decided to return the novel rights to the as to not restrict the author’s activities.
While it is unfortunate that most of these works possibly won’t be able to see the light of day as a full-fledged visual novel or anime, hopefully with the return of rights to the authors, the novels will be able to find home at some other publishing houses.
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