As part of our never-ending attempt to keep y'all (and ourselves) informed about BL developments in the U.S., we shipped of a batch of questions to Yen Press regarding their recent announcement of their first BL titles, all three by Lily Hoshino. Little did we expect Co-publishing Director Kurt Hassler himself to answer them! So here you go: the basics of Yen Press' yaoi.

YS: Yen Press has just announced its first boys love titles. Does the company plan to make BL a regular part of its line? How many volumes a year should we expect?

KH: BL being such an important part of the medium to so many fans, we feel it is only natural that we should want to make it a part of our list. We have a number of BL fans on staff, in fact. That said, we really aren't setting an artificial target as to the number of books we intend to put out in a year. It will all be based on the quality of the books we see and have the opportunity to acquire and what we feel the fans will support.

YS: Many other manga companies are doing BL. Does Yen Press have plans to focus on a particular niche within BL? Are you planning to release any mature/hardcore books?

KH: We tend not to try to focus on particular niches but rather look at the market as a whole. Why pigeonhole ourselves? If there's a book we want to publish, we will. As to your second question, all three of the initial titles we have announced will receive a mature rating.

Hit the jump to read the rest!

So we still haven't got our third and final winner for our bingo contest-- so starting right now, the first person who was playing card 1 who This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wins the final prize, even if they don't go through and tell me what their bingo would have been. C'mon, free stuff!

Also, I just wanted to let you know that we have added two lists to our YC07 coverage page. The first is a list of all the announced titles sorted by title and type, and the second is the same but sorted by publisher. Hopefully that'll be a handy reference for y'all!

How lucky am I? Literally the day after I ordered their new magazine BL Twist, they close down their purchasing page and announce that the October launch of the mag has been cancelled and they're refunding subscriptions.

On top of that, forum user pgrape says that C.B. Potts, writer of Iris' new graphic novel Home on the Range, was supposed to be at Yaoi Con but that the publisher had told them a mere ten days before the con started that they wouldn't be going and that the book had been pulled indefinitely from the company's schedule. Note that this has not been confirmed! I have an e-mail out to Iris to try and get a confirmation or denial.

However, Home on the Range IS listed on Amazon.com as coming out October 15th, and it is also not yet fully orderable-- only preordable.

As always, when we know more, you'll know more.