Web fiction
Shōsetsuka ni Narō
Japan's dominant user-submitted web novel site, launched in 2004 and the sourcing pipeline behind a large share of modern light novels and isekai anime.
Shōsetsuka ni Narō ("Let's Become a Novelist") is "a Japanese web novel publishing website created by Yusuke Umezaki," launched on April 2, 2004, where writers post novels that anyone can read free of charge. It is now among Japan's most popular arts and entertainment sites, hosting more than a million user-submitted novels, dominated by young-adult fiction centered on the isekai genre; "narō-kei" has become shorthand for the site's characteristic style of story.
Its significance is the pipeline it proved: popular Narō works are picked up as print light novels, then adapted into manga and anime, and more than two hundred novels from the site have reached anime, including Re:Zero, KonoSuba, Overlord and Mushoku Tensei. For web-serial writers everywhere, Narō demonstrated that free chapter-by-chapter serialization can sit at the top of a commercial publishing funnel.