L-boom (エルブーム)

» see l-boom.lbm-tec.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

L-boom described itself in every page title as a creator-support service for novels and illustration, which is a more specific claim than it sounds. The pitch was that a writer and an artist who had never met could be matched on the site and make something together, with the company promising book deals for the good ones and crowdfunding to pay for the rest. A teaser page went up on 10 August 2017. The beta opened on 13 November, and the Japanese Wikipedia entry gives that date as the fifteenth, two days later than the site's own announcement.

It was two products wearing one name. The professional side ran commissioned serials from a roster that stood at nine novelists and twelve illustrators in its final spring, several of whom had real credits at Kadokawa imprints. The part where ordinary people could post anything at all did not arrive until 29 July 2018, some eight and a half months later. For most of its first year L-boom was a magazine pretending to be a platform.

LBM Technology built it. The firm had been set up in October 2016 with five million yen of capital and ten staff, and it listed exactly one product under its services heading. In March 2019 an HR and IT firm called H.R.I bought LBM outright and took over running the site the following month. The shutdown notice appeared on 18 July. LBM's own corporate site was still advertising L-boom with a working View Website button in August 2020, a year after the thing that button pointed at had been switched off.

~ the record ~

~ the audio side ~

A small novel-posting startup had drama CDs on pre-order from August 2018 and a web radio show of its own. The voice talent attached to these was not obscure. That list is also the reason L-boom has any documented existence at all: it survives in Japanese Wikipedia through citations in eight voice-actor and illustrator articles, and essentially nowhere else. No trade publication appears to have covered the site in its lifetime or at its death.

The explanation sits on the parent company's own site. LBM Technology listed three business lines, and the entertainment one ran, in its words, from content services through to a voice-actor school. Read in that order the product stops looking like a novel site with an odd hobby and starts looking like what it was, which is a supply of stories for a business that already had people to read them aloud.

~ the prize and the rights ~

The one contest it ran is the clearest window into the deal on offer. Entries to the L-boom SS Scenario Grand Prize opened on 1 May 2018 and closed three weeks later, around three thousand characters, open to professionals and amateurs but members only. The winner took fifty thousand yen, a professional illustrator to draw the thing, a voice actor to read it, and registration as an L-boom professional. Four runners-up got ten thousand yen each and two more got five. Everybody who entered got a written assessment back.

Then the clause that explains the economics: publication rights and secondary-use rights in the winning works belonged to LBM Technology. Ten works went up between 7 September and 2 November 2018. The prize pool topped out at a hundred thousand yen all told, and for a company whose other division taught voice acting, that was not an expensive way to stock a shelf.

~ back it up yourself ~

The closing notice ran to a date and two times. New signups stopped at 16:00 on Wednesday 31 July 2019, and the service itself stopped at the same hour on Friday 30 August. Between those lines sits the sentence that matters: after the service stops, posted works will no longer be viewable, so please take your own backups. Forty-three days of notice, and no export route to anywhere else.

The timing was unkind in a way nobody planned. L-boom announced its death on 18 July 2019, which was the day Hobby Japan launched a competing novel site, and LINE launched one of its own on 5 August, twenty-five days before L-boom switched off. The successor H.R.I kept, eru KIKAKU, gave up on owning a platform entirely: it ran a chat-novel award on Kodansha's site instead, funded by sponsors at seventy thousand yen a head. It also said in writing that it wanted to tie up as few of the author's rights as possible. That was the correction, and it arrived one product too late.

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