Crimson Maple Literature had no idea about the behind-the-scenes behavior of those fans.
What they did notice, however, was that the sales department was thoroughly stunned by the numbers for this issue of Fleeting Blossoms.
After all, the previous issue of Fleeting Blossoms had sold only 305,600 copies.
This issue, however, had suddenly jumped to 360,000. In just a few days, sales had increased by fifty to sixty thousand copies. It was strange, no matter how they looked at it.
The sales team could not help but feel uneasy.
And the oddities did not stop with the magazine sales.
There was also the issue of the Blue Spring Ride standalone volume. Whether in Minamijo or outside the region, partnered distributors kept calling, urging Crimson Maple to ship more copies of Blue Spring Ride.
Of course, this was not because the first volume had already sold out. It had only been on sale for one day.
There was no way it could have disappeared that fast.
Rather, based on the sales data from the first day, distributors had sensed that the initial print run of eighty thousand copies was likely not going to be enough. That was why they were proactively requesting additional stock.
As for the exact sales performance of Blue Spring Ride, Crimson Maple would still have to wait until next Saturday, when the first week of standalone sales was officially tallied.
On Monday, the results for Chapter Ten of Blue Spring Ride were released. The rating remained unchanged, while the fan vote count climbed to 12,898.
What surprised the staff at Crimson Maple was that Blue Spring Ride still had room to grow in fan votes. Whether it was standalone volumes or serialized magazines, performance metrics often lagged behind real-world reactions.
Just like how Crimson Maple did not yet understand why this issue of Fleeting Blossoms had seen such a noticeable boost in sales, neither the publisher nor the distributors really understood why Blue Spring Ride's standalone sales were performing far better than expected, both within Minamijo and outside it.
At its core, Blue Spring Ride was a commercial work that had already survived brutal competition and extreme market saturation in another world.
At the very least, within the youth romance manga genre, it was absolutely among the top-tier titles.
At the height of its popularity, the manga version of Blue Spring Ride ranked just below a handful of legendary romance series like Kimi ni Todoke.
For readers in this world, including the staff at Crimson Maple, they knew the novel was excellent. But the word "excellent" covered too wide a range. Its boundaries were vague, much like labels such as good, average, or poor..
People at Crimson Maple, including Yukino, could only roughly judge that Blue Spring Ride was very good.
The real question was how good it would be in the market. No one truly knew.
Estimates like one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand copies per volume were nothing more than educated guesses based on past experience.
The market itself was not rigid. It was fluid.
After the first volume of Blue Spring Ride went on sale on Saturday and fans spent an entire day flooding the publisher's forums with complaints and lingering discussions, something subtle began to change.
Starting Sunday, in Minamijo as well as across Japan, similar posts quietly began appearing on various light novel forums.
"Guys, I recently found an insanely good novel. It's called Blue Spring Ride, from a Minamijo publisher. If you're in a reading slump or like youth romance, go check it out right now. If it's not good, you can come punch me through the screen." At first, these were just simple fan recommendation posts.
Readers outside Minamijo mostly assumed they were just paid online promoters hired by a regional publisher to hype a new release, and did not take them seriously.
But as the number of replies under these posts kept increasing, and people saw hundreds of comments that were almost unanimously praising the novel, curiosity inevitably began to stir.
Even so, very few people were willing to immediately trust these voices and go buy Blue Spring Ride right away.
The problem was that once someone saw several such posts within a single day, their mindset began to change.
"Really? Is it actually that good? That many people praising it like this feels excessive. I refuse to believe it's really as good as they say."
Once human curiosity was triggered, it was hard to suppress.
Crimson Maple's support for the release of Blue Spring Ride's standalone volume was limited.
But in reality, as long as a work was good enough, readers would spontaneously organize themselves to promote it, acting as unpaid advertisers and spending large amounts of time recommending it to newcomers.
Of course, this kind of grassroots promotion alone could never create anything truly absurd.
For example, it was impossible for fan-driven promotion alone to suddenly let a novel stomp on industry giants like Clearstream Library or Starfield Publishing.
Those companies had spent decades and countless fortunes building their distribution and marketing channels. The idea that they could be toppled so easily by word of mouth was pure fantasy.
But for Blue Spring Ride, this spontaneous fan promotion was already more than enough to noticeably impact its performance.
Within Minamijo, the novel was already quite popular and had decent name recognition.
The real key was outside Minamijo, where it was basically barren land. Even if only a small fraction of readers in each region chose to believe the fans' recommendations out of curiosity, once you added together more than a dozen regions, the numbers became impossible to ignore.
At the very least, it had already made Crimson Maple, which initially believed the first volume would sell only around two hundred thousand copies with first-week sales under eighty thousand, start to feel that something was off.
Because by Tuesday morning alone, reports had already reached Crimson Maple from bookstores and distributors across the country stating that the initial shipment of Blue Spring Ride standalones was close to selling out, and requesting immediate reprints.
"What's going on? It's only Tuesday. How can the initial eighty thousand copies already be close to selling out? This is just a novel serialized in Fleeting Blossoms, isn't it?"
"And it's not just Minamijo running short. Even outside the region, demand is the same. There are already new orders totaling tens of thousands of copies from other areas."
Although the official sales data for Blue Spring Ride had not yet been released, many people inside Crimson Maple had already sensed that something was wrong.
The company quickly notified the printing plant to work overtime to print more copies of Blue Spring Ride and rush them to their destinations.
As the editor responsible for Blue Spring Ride, Yukino had been closely tracking related data all week.
"This feels wrong," she thought, finding herself unable to concentrate throughout the day, her attention constantly drifting back to Blue Spring Ride.
"Why are sales outside Minamijo so high? There was zero promotion in those regions."
While the exact number of copies sold had not yet been officially counted, based on shipment volume alone, aside from the release day on Saturday, the total order demand from outside Minamijo after Sunday had already nearly matched, and in some cases even showed signs of surpassing, local demand within Minamijo.
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