Yaoi House, Underground Headed For The Boy-Harem In The Sky?
Western BL took another hit today: the small-press publisher of BL books, Yaoi House, and its sister site, Yaoi Underground (which sells e-chapters of the owner’s fiction), are reportedly both up in the air after owner Kira Takenouchi announced that Yaoi Underground LLC will be terminated and money returned to investors, while she is surrendering her own shares of Yaoi House LLC and leaving it up to the investors to do what they want with it.
When I came across the post it reminded me to check up on Iris Print, another US-based BL publisher (of both comics and prose) that ran into some trouble a while back. They have managed to get two of their prose books, the novel A Strong and Sudden Thaw and the short story collection Connections up and available on Amazon’s Kindle; regular ebooks are also pending, according to owner Kellie Lynch.
Tags: bl, iris print, western industry, yaoi, yaoi house, yaoi underground
March 17th, 2008 at 9:34 am
that really sucks! i have a few friends that read kiras stuff and are all upset about this! im getting the ebooks from irisprint, hoping they do okay, and have you heard of yaoi magazine (yaoimagazine.com)? i hope they stay strong too! thx for the info!
March 17th, 2008 at 9:44 am
@tina: I do know of yaoi magazine, though I have yet to acquire a copy for myself :)
March 17th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Wow. o_o. I backed off Yaoi House when I got a weird vibe about Kira. She’s very talented, and very nice–but after checking out her net history I decided not to submit any stories. :/ It looks like, from the ramblings in her journal, that she went through a medical issue and has now found G*d. I hope the other shareholders can pull it together; so much for the manga she was planning on releasing.
On the Yaoi Magazine tip…has one purchased and got their ‘Yaoi Magazine’? For sales being ’stampede’ worthy, I’ve yet to see one review or blog entry about it. I submitted an article to them, they got back to me, but then I heard nothing else since that initial email. Anyone?
March 18th, 2008 at 3:53 am
[...] ComiPress and Gia Manry report that small-press manga publisher Yaoi House LLC faces uncertainty after founder Kira [...]
March 18th, 2008 at 3:54 am
[...] Gia notes that the small global yaoi publisher Yaoi House is closing its doors. [...]
April 8th, 2008 at 6:47 am
Hey All,
I am one of the shareholders for Yaoi House LLC, and it’s Web Services Head. I am now the one responsible for hosting all of the sites.
Yaoi House is still very much alive. Heather (The Interim President) and I have been working away at getting another e-commerce solution running, as well as finding authors to pick up stories.
The new “Yaoi Shoppe” should be online within the next 12-24 hours if not sooner. Look for the main page at our website to change and begin linking to our new Shoppe.
If there are any questions I can be reached at tgrossett@yaoihouse.net
–
Regards,
Rev. Tyler Grossett
Shareholder
Web Services Head
Yaoi House LLC
https://yaoihouse.net
tgrossett@yaoihouse.net
April 9th, 2008 at 3:30 am
In response to my previous comment,
We are now officially online.
You can checkout the new shop at:
https://yaoihouse.net/shop/
Regards,
Rev. Tyler Grossett
Shareholder
Web Services Head
Yaoi House LLC
https://yaoihouse.net
tgrossett@yaoihouse.net
April 9th, 2008 at 7:14 am
[...] of you may remember that I reported on the strange matter of Yaoi House, a western BL publisher whose owner surrendered all her shares [...]
May 12th, 2008 at 9:39 am
[...] any of you remember Yaoi House, an original boys’ love fiction publisher I’ve reported on twice? Well, things have gotten [...]
January 7th, 2009 at 10:14 am
No worries, old Yaoi House/Yaoi Underground fans and staff. Sad that you were right, but hapy to tell you about it.
She’s folding up house again - a total repeat. She’s thrown away her (supposed) co-owners again, and hasn’t updated for months. There goes another few hundred people’s hopes. . .I dunno. It’s on that Dear Author website, where she says this stuff.
It would feel a little better if she hadn’t made tens of thousands of dollars for just about nothing, again, though.
Just stay back. . .in any of her supertwin forms, “Kira” is a scammer. I don’t think she’s even sick. . .she knows right from wrong. She just likes wrong better. It gets her condos on the water in Florida.
(What blows my mind is, to hear her tell it, Jesus is all for stealing money under the guise of publishing explicit gay sex, cheating her co-workers, and lying to just about the whole dern Intarwebz.)
Stay Safe! Don’t be next.
January 8th, 2009 at 3:04 am
Yes, looks like kira has not changed one bit. given the test to see if she was being honest, she fails miserably…got it from her latest victims, caught her throwing it all away secretly and then kicks then out for calling her on it!
Yeah, that’s the kira we know so well.
Hide the women and children!!
February 9th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Tell me about it!!
Joined her site back in 2006 at $5 a month and then became a Blondie member. In 2007 paid $85.25 for three books that will never be published or if published will be more sedate renditions. Requested a refund of my money because of the aforementioned reasons. I paid for yaoi-not milktoast renditions. The reply I received was terse and the general gist was “good luck on getting your refund.” To add insult to injury was immediately locked out of her site. No great loss there. I’m a hard core yaoi girl and not the damn least ashamed as she now professes to be. I mean, come on, she was even questioning the morality of masturbation!!!
Know what Kira’s real problem is? Too much stress which wreaks havoc with bi-polar sufferers. She had too many irons (books) in the fire (her brain) and she stresses trying to write chapters for these books. Unfortuantely she uses finding Christ to bail herself out. Or she simply has run out of story lines and or plots. Who knows? This is just my slant on the never ending drame that has become Kira Takenouchi.
She just doesn’t know how many of her fans she has let down. She throws everybody into a tizzy, comes back, and again turns everything topsy, turvy. She had sold herself as a yaoi writer and then claim that that genre is morally wrong not once but TWICE.
She posted in January that it was said that she straddled the fence. She said that maybe she did. Well my advice to Kira would be to quit straddling that fence and decide what genre she is going to write-yaoi or henti. She owes her subscribers that much.
Hope she finds some happiness in this her second foray into finding faith in Christ. As least Christ would have refunded my money to me.
February 9th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Demand a charge-back for your $85.25! Email your credit card company and demand a charge back for a product you will never receive. If you paid via PayPal email them! She has to be held accountable for her flagrant abuse of customers!! She has used the “banned for life” as an excuse to pretend you don’t exist, so she continues to take in new subscribers (future victims) and will screw them over soon!! Save them from her idiocy and call her on the carpet! That’s what Ester did and look what it go her- she worked her ASS OFF for her and she got locked out for discovering her true intentions! Demand what you paid for(!!!)
February 9th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
yeah but she’s not confuzed. shes not stradeling anything but poor christian boys who prolly didnt want to hear about her vagina anymore than we did lol.
she knows what shes doing both times too. shes a joke to be made fun of and pointed at and yeled at till she learns her lessons and STOPS HURTING EVERYONE and SCAMING. AND GIVES BACK the $$$$$$ TO EVERY1. JooKnoWhatImeen?!?1
so if this is WHAT she is it can only be funny…… noone should cry 1 more tear for her b/c SHES happy in the apartment everyone bought her (AS LONG AS EVERYONE GETS THEiR MONEY BACK!!! OMG tamingriki DO IT PLEEZ!!!!!). god I hate liars. she doesnt even care america has a recesion.
lol I thought her writing wasnt good enough to buy a house with even if its suposed to be good Yaoi.
February 10th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Thanks for replying to my post.
Just got off the Dear Author site that had some posts on it and lawdy, lawdy, the Kira bashing! Got thru the first few posts and there she is, Kira herself! She was trying to justify herself as usual. By the way, these posts are before this recent episode of Kira’s. Wanted to comment but coudn’t find anything on that site to allow me to do so. Will try again later. Wanted to reply to some of the posts and got frustrated because I couldn’t. So I’ll do it here. Hope you don’t mind.
What Kira doesn’t understand that when you present yourself as one thing and then suddenly change horses in midstream not once but twice your going to get critism. And when you run a business that people have to pay for and then not deliver the goods you have an obligation to those paying customers to give them back their money if they request it. If it was her, she certainly would request HER money back or ELSE!!
It is my personal feeling that she should dissolve her business due to her inability to provide a stable mindset and get a 9-5 job. Like, maybe at a publishing company? heh, heh! If she still has the need to write, she can go to any of the fanfic based websites like everybody else and not get paid for it. I, myself, am working on a story which when ready will post on adultfanfiction.net. It will be under the male/male category and it will be oozing with hot man sex. It is yet untitled but will be once I’m ready to put it out there for the fans to read. I’ll even let you know so you can be on the lookout for it.
By the way, hows the weather your way? Here in Mesa, AZ it is 50 degrees and windy as hell. Other parts are ass deep in snow!!
Ciao!!
February 10th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
In her latest post Kira said she felt like a “mean grumpy christian.” There would be no reason for you to be a “mean, grumpy christian” if you did right by your word and do as you had promised. For one thing, you accepted money for books you were writing. Now after 2 “conversions” you not only declare that you will not be finishing those promised books (that people paid with their hard-earned money,) but you now have decided to change their genre completely. You were paid for a product and you have failed to provide it. You laugh at people burning Taming Riki books, and that you hate that book?! That “book” put you on the map you moron, and now you poke people in the eye with this statement? People trusted you Kira, and now you are banning them for daring to request their money back for books you will not complete as ordered and advertised. You can be sued if people grow a brain, and at the very least place a claim with their credit card companies or the Better Business Bureau. Your new found conversion begs the question- “What would Jesus do?” At least he would pay back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, eh Brutus?
February 12th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I noticed that the Dear Author page was mentioned, and if you actually read all 316 replies you can clearly place the series of events with her journal. She was looking for trouble and she found it.
I don’t get it. Kira complains that people post exerts from her ‘private’ journal on other sites, but how can one have a private journal on the internet? Granted, she can keep her ‘readers’ from insulting her, her work, God, the flying spaghetti monster, whatever on her site but that’s not going to stop them from doing it somewhere else.
Kira is just riding the gravy train and it’s going to eventually run out….regardless of what she says. Her past transgressions, i.e. lying, has already killed her credibility. It’s only a matter of time before she’s hitting the payment looking for HONEST work. I’m sure that there will be the handful of devoted stragglers left but I would still consider Kira’s site as the 2008 version of the pet rock.
February 12th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Waiting to see if Kira does another 360 and goes back to writing yaoi. With her, ANYTHING is possible.
Since she is her own boss now she will be fully responsible for her actions and totally liable for any future fallout with subscribers/fans. She will have nothing and no one to fall back on. She has burnt her bridges.
March 8th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
For years I’ve been a pretty loyal reader of Kira’s, but I have to admit I’m pretty frustrated at this point.
I haven’t read most of the forums, so maybe I’ve been naive, but I do believe she has bi-polar issues and that if she didn’t things would probably be very different. That said, she does have issues and unfortunately without the right people to guide her, she’s made some very serious business mistakes. I kept wanting to urge her to just step back and not attempt so much because it was obvious that she always bit off more than she could chew- and then ended up not updating, backtracking, and otherwise opening herself to criticism that she knew she wasn’t going to be able handle well.
But I still thought the situation was more sad and unfortunate than frustrating. What annoyed me most recently was when she got upset that people wanted her to keep her old stories available. I can see her side in that she’s done with those stories and they don’t sit well with her. However, I do take offense when she says that if we read her stories only cuz they were yaoi that now *we* need help! And that we *need* to read her new stories if that’s the case, because our souls are in peril, etc. That’s when I get irritated!
She’s troubled and has burrowed into Christianity to seek peace. I have a feeling it will not be that simple and she’s really going to end up beating herself up for every carnal urge she has now, but that’s her decision. I will even try to respect that decision but that does not mean that I want to be prosthelytized to! I have not been judgmental with her, so it disappoints me that she would be with me- especially when I am simply a fan of her fics and really hoped there was some way I could still read them. I wish she’d take that as a compliment rather than be frustrated with it.
Perhaps that says more about her own state of mind- and the conflict there- than anything else.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:23 am
What a bunch of crap. You are all better off giving that woman a wide berth, or else you will get nothing but grief for your cares. There are plenty of “excellent” Ai no Kusabi fanfiction, and even better quality of writing found at adultfanfiction.net or fanfiction.net, so cheer up yaoi lovers, kira aka “I’m saved, but YOU are not” has left the building, and you are better off letting the door close firmly behind her. Be thankful, she didn’t rip your heart out and stomp on it,(as she did mine,) on her way to “enlightenment.” Oh, but she thanks you for your “many” years of support. -snort-
March 9th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
I’m glad someone else is outing this fraud!!! It seems everytime she wants to bail and take the money and run she turns to “Jesus” and his apostles. I don’t care how mentally ill she’s supposed to be. The bottom line is that under the guise of providing a product ie. her books and stories she scammed people out of their money. Yeah I’m bitter and here’s a direct quote forwarded to me regarding her Yaoi stories and whether we’ll ever see the rest of the books:
Please stop emailing me asking me to keep the yaoi fiction up or other
similar requests. I’ve made my decision. You say you respect my decision,
“but please [enter inappropriate request here]“. Well, to be blunt, you
don’t respect my decision if you keep emailing me asking me to do what I’ve
clearly already stated I’m not going to do.
The stories have been put to sleep, for now. Let them rest in peace.
The stories I’ll be writing from here on out will be of a much higher
quality than any of the yaoi I wrote before. If you enjoyed my writing
before, you’ll continue to enjoy it now. It’s going to get very exciting.
Oh how nice!! You took money for stories and now they are “wink,wink” going to be put the sleep… Nice way to dangle the carrot bitch!! Guess what, as far as I’m concerned your fanfics (which is what they are) are public domain because we the public paid for them.
You’re through!! So as a public service I’ve uploaded the text files for Taming Riki III and Headmaster’s Chambers. You know, the evil fics Jebus told you to get rid of (until as such time as you run out of cash and pimp them out once more to unsuspecting people).
You’re through scamming!! I hope these links end up everywhere!! and on every LJ. Your refusal to refund people’s money makes me sick!!
Grab the links folks, don’t let this scammer get away!!
http://www.4shared.com/file/92050297/5de8fd83/Headmaster_Chambers.html
http://www.4shared.com/file/92050288/d44cd153/Part_III_Taming_Riki.html
March 25th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
I must be really stupid but did Kira say she was gonna stop writing yaoi and then start writing it again then stop again. That seems very stupid i wanted to buy her books but i decided to wait until she had them finished and know i am thankful i did.
April 26th, 2009 at 2:43 am
Went to Kira’s new site and you have to pay $4.00 and odd cents. The graphics and music are reminicent of her other site that she had under kiramorningstar. I read the couple of stories she had there at that time and all I could do was shake my head. The writing was still good but the characters were so…..uninspiring?
I began to notice that with each chapter I could see the old Kira peeking through a.k.a. sexual tension. It wasn’t too much longer after that she came back.
Give it time, she will come back. I, however, will not give her a third shot at breaking my heart.
April 26th, 2009 at 2:49 am
Forgot to mention this but in the fall of 2009 a new cd of Ai no Kusabi will be coming out. It will have 13 episodes. You can go on YouTube and key in Ai no Kusabi and it will have few renditions of the forthcoming cd. I, for one, am waiting with baited breath.
April 26th, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Other than the links already posted, does anyone have other chapters of Kira’s works? I know she said the stories will R.I.P., but frankly, it feels absurd that Kira has decided to pull down the stories all together. If she’s moved on, then why not let her former (loyal) readers be able to read what she left behind? Isn’t it better than burying them?
I’m going to check my old HD and if I find anything, I’ll try and post links. I wouldn’t mind trying to continue some of her stories myself either. If she can publish Ai no Kusabi fanfiction, I don’t see why others can’t continue the stories she promised us in our own fanfiction!
April 27th, 2009 at 12:51 am
Well what’s good for the goose is good for the gander- no? But before you take pen to paper, you must have the author’s “OK” to use her “original” characters. She has only given that to one person that I know of. However, fan fiction is just that- so as long as you do not make any $$ off it you should be ok.
Yes, I am/was a loyal fan also, and know for a fact she had written Keiko Yoshihara for just that, so was able to publish “Taming Riki.”
Now as far as her other stories, they are all “originals, with original characters,” so -no- you would not be able to continue them -for profit- without her permission, but if you are just going to write in “fandom,” then write your little heart out.
April 27th, 2009 at 5:46 am
Yeah, I agree. I’ve gotten a little bitter I guess. Kira definitely got the ‘ok’ for her works and I never had any issues with that. I definitely don’t plan on or intend to make any money on her stuff. I would just like to see the stories continue in some fashion, so if it doesn’t look as if they will ever continue ‘officially’, I might try some fanfics! ;)