I am the Entertainment Tycoon Chapter 1014: June 1st Morning Rush

Following the manager’s brief huddle, the entire staff swung into action with clockwork efficiency. With less than forty minutes remaining before the front doors officially unlocked, Joan immediately stepped up to assist her senior coworkers. Their task was to finalize the physical layout of the store’s primary weapon against the waves of readers: the high-visibility front glass display and the massive, tiered highlight shelves sitting directly inside the entrance.

Joan pushed a heavy rolling cart stacked high with crisp, plastic-wrapped bundles of literature right up to the front windows. "Where do we start?" she asked, rolling up her sleeves, eager to prove her utility to the team.

"Manga on the left, light novels on the right," a senior clerk replied, deftly slicing open a fresh cardboard box with a utility knife. "We mirror the exact ranking of the monthly best-seller chart. Number one goes right at eye level in the center of the window display, while numbers two through ten spiral outward. It makes the setup incredibly intuitive for the customers sprinting inside."

Joan nodded, carefully lifting the top-ranking manga bundles onto the sleek glass shelves. As someone who had spent her university years analyzing classical literature and deep prose, handling modern pop culture volumes was an entirely foreign experience. While a vast number of Sakureans consumed manga or light novels on a daily basis, there were bound to be exceptions, and Joan was one of them. Her personal library consisted strictly of traditional books, leaving her almost completely uninformed about the contemporary comic and serialization industry.

After all, manga and light novels had only emerged within the last fifty years, whereas the Sakura Abode Country boasted centuries of written history shaped by thousands of legendary writers over the generations. Even prior to the historic unification of the Yamato and Pendragon clans a few centuries ago, the land had recorded thousands of years of deep historical and cultural evolution. This ancient heritage had birthed a profound foundation for traditional literature. It was simply that in modern times, manga and light novels had exploded into the spotlight, establishing themselves as the dominant popular literature of the current era.

Working side-by-side with her colleagues, Joan quickly caught onto the rhythmic pace. While she meticulously aligned the cover artwork of the undisputed top-three titans at eye level, ensuring they were perfectly front-facing and unshadowed, her eyes eventually drifted down to the outer edges of the display.

Joan nodded, carefully lifting the top-ranking manga bundles onto the sleek glass shelves. As someone who had spent her university years analyzing classical literature and deep prose, handling modern pop culture volumes was an entirely foreign experience. While a vast number of Sakureans consumed manga or light novels on a daily basis, there were bound to be exceptions, and Joan was one of them. Her personal library consisted strictly of traditional books, leaving her almost completely uninformed about the contemporary comic and serialization industry.

After all, manga and light novels had only emerged within the last fifty years, whereas the Sakura Abode Country boasted centuries of written history shaped by thousands of legendary writers over the generations. Even prior to the historic unification of the Yamato and Pendragon clans a few centuries ago, the land had recorded thousands of years of deep historical and cultural evolution. This ancient heritage had birthed a profound foundation for traditional literature. It was simply that in modern times, manga and light novels had exploded into the spotlight, establishing themselves as the dominant popular literature of the current era.

Working side-by-side with her colleagues, Joan quickly caught onto the rhythmic pace. While she meticulously aligned the cover artwork of the undisputed top-three titans at eye level, ensuring they were perfectly front-facing and unshadowed, her eyes eventually drifted down to the outer edges of the display.

Sitting right at the very bottom edge of the tiered ranking—safely locked into the tenth-place slot—was the freshly arrived Naruto Volume 9.

Joan picked up the bundle and evaluated the cover art with a neutral, objective eye as she set it into place. From her perspective as a traditional literature enthusiast, the vibrant orange design and bold, stylized font didn’t trigger any strong reaction or particular excitement; it looked fundamentally similar to the other nine manga series charting ahead of it on the display. She recognized it as a relatively fresh competitor that had only scraped its way onto the top-ten list a couple of months ago, but without any personal context regarding the story, its themes, or its author, she simply treated it as another pop-culture commodity. Her analysis remained strictly academic, acknowledging the bright color choices meant to catch a casual passerby’s eye before smoothly moving on to finish the rest of the display.

For outsiders, her attitude might seem disdainful, but she genuinely didn’t feel any disdain for mangas or light novels. It might be due to being raised by two college professors, but Joan never had any interest in mangas or light novels. Her genuine feeling was indifference to it.

So, Joan worked on placing the manga on the displays just like she worked normally.

Next, she helped a couple of other coworkers on the light novel display on the other side. Joan carefully gave the copies to the others to stack the top ten light novels of the past month. Her eye briefly passed the beautiful, detailed anime-style illustrations that graced their covers. The tiered shelves quickly transformed from empty wood and glass into a vibrant, colorful mosaic of the kingdom’s reigning literary hits.

"Perfect alignment, Joan," the senior clerk praised, stepping back to view the final composition from outside the shop window. "If the display looks this crisp from the street, people won’t even hesitate. They’ll just point, grab, and head straight to the registers."

Joan smiled, wiping a stray speck of dust off the glass display as the clock on the wall crept closer to the opening hour. Looking through the polished window, she could already see the first early customers slowing down on the sidewalk, their eyes instantly locking onto the freshly minted display.

Joan felt something stir in her mind as she observed the customers’ eyes light up while looking over the mangas and light novel displays. She didn’t look down on them for their passion; in her opinion, all forms of literature held their own inherent importance. Just because she didn’t personally enjoy the medium didn’t mean she considered it inferior to the classical books she preferred.

She recalled a quote from her college professor on this exact subject that she had always deeply loved: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."

Watching the genuine excitement of the crowd outside, she realized that despite the modern formatting and illustrations, these contemporary pages were achieving that exact purpose.

When the manager unlocked the heavy glass doors, a vibrant wave of energy instantly transformed the quiet morning into a bustling hive of activity. The sales floor remained continuously packed as departing customers were immediately replaced by fresh arrivals from the street, maintaining a steady and lively crowd throughout the morning.

Joan was stationed at the secondary cash register, working alongside a senior clerk who moved with practiced ease. Within minutes, a consistent line snaked from the counter back to the tiered front displays.

"Don’t worry about the size of the line, Joan," the senior clerk muttered between transactions, her fingers flying across the scanner. "Just focus on the customer in front of you. Scan, bag, process the payment, and keep a steady rhythm."

Joan nodded tightly, taking a deep breath to settle her racing pulse. She received her first customer—a young high school student who eagerly placed three different light novel editions onto the counter, his hands practically trembling with anticipation. Joan scanned the glossy covers, wrapped them neatly in the bookstore’s signature green paper bags, and processed his card. When she handed the bag over, the boy offered a beaming, breathless thank-you before rushing out the door, eager to open the pages on his train ride.

As the morning pressed on with the customer headcount at the bookstore stubbornly hovering around forty, Joan attended to customer after customer, and a fascinating pattern began to emerge in her observations. She served a corporate salaryman in a crisp suit who looked incredibly exhausted, yet his eyes lit up with genuine, youthful relief the moment he secured the top-ranking manga volume from the display. She attended a group of university girls who were animatedly discussing character arcs and theories, their shared laughter bouncing off the book-lined walls.

Even the manga titles that weren’t even on highlight display. Several types of manga were being sold. Multiple times, Joan reached into the under-counter inventory to hand out copies of some manga that she had never heard of to fans who didn’t even consider buying any of the Top-10 mangas. After all, although the 10 best-selling mangas sold a lot of copies, the amount they sold wasn’t even half as much as all the other mangas combined. When people said that Sakura Kingdom was the manga country, it wasn’t an exaggeration. It was estimated that every month, it was sold over 70 million copes of manga copies just in the Sakura Abode Country.

All in all, the Sakureans had a deep passion for this literature.

But without a doubt, Joan noticed that the most sold mangas were the 10 mangas on display.

Every single person who stepped up to her register carried that exact same spark of unadulterated enthusiasm. They weren’t just buying paper and ink; they were buying an escape, a piece of comfort, and a shared experience.

Standing in the middle of this unrelenting rush, Joan felt something profound stir inside her chest. Her university education had taught her to analyze literature through an academic, historical lens, often treating books as cold artifacts to be dissected. But looking at the radiant, excited faces of the thirty to forty people constantly filling the shop, her professor’s words echoed in her mind again. This modern media—manga and light novels that she had previously dismissed indifferently—was infecting thousands of people with genuine, powerful feelings. It was a vivid, living demonstration of art in its purest, most successful form, and for the first time since graduating, Joan felt a quiet, unexpected surge of inspiration beginning to take root in her own heart.