At Sakura Con this weekend, Yen Press announced the fall 2014 launch of its new "light novel" imprint, which will be known as Yen On.  In Japan "light novels" is the name given to the category of shorter illustrated novels that primarily target middle and high school students (similar to YA fiction here in the U.S.).  Light novels cover a wide range of genres including science fiction, fantasy, romance, adventure, as well as comedy, and "light novels" have become an increasingly important source of new manga and anime franchises. 
 
Among the first light novels due from Yen in Q4 of 2014 are Yukito Ayatsuji’s horror novel Another, which will be issued in a hardcover omnibus edition in October, Kazuma Kamachi’s influential A Certain Magical Index, which spun off the popular A Certain Scientific Railgun anime, and Fujino Omori’s hilarious fantasy Is It Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?  Yen plans to publish 24 light novels in 2015 as its light novel program gets up to speed.  
 
The top new manga license announced by Yen at Sakura Con is King of Eden, a powerful new masterpiece of the grotesque from Takashi Nagasaki, the co-creator of Monster, 20th Century Boys, Master Keaton, and Pluto.  Chapters of this new saga will appear first digitally starting after May 1, 2014.
 
Other manga licenses announced include Suu Minazuki’s 3-volume sexy (ecchi) seinen series Gou-Dere Sora Nagihara about a young otaku, whose wish that his favorite sexy manga character would come to life is fulfilled with surprising consequences, the surprisingly affecting and bittersweet romantic saga Love at Fourteen by Fuka Mizutani, and the single-volume historical romance shojo manga The Angel of Elhamburg by Aki.  Yen plans to debut Gou-Dere Sora Nagihara and Love at Fourteen in November of 2014, and publish The Angel of Elhamburg in the spring of 2015.