You might have noticed that our last blog post was from all the way in early July—heading fast toward three months ago—and that Tweets over the last month or so have also gotten a bit sparse. So I wanted to talk about why the Renta! BL Team has been so busy this summer, why we’re going to continue to be pretty busy, and what kind of things you all can look forward to as Renta! users.

The trigger and most notable reason for our busyness in early summer was Citrus Con 2025! We wrote a whole report on the experience pretty quickly after it happened, and it was an amazing and fun opportunity all around and I’d change nothing about how involved we were, but it definitely put us way behind on a bunch of our regular daily tasks—especially because as soon as Citrus Con was over, preparations for AnimeNYC kicked into high gear. I’ve been meaning to write the report for AnimeNYC as well, but we’ve been too busy. 😭

“What are you guys so busy with???” WELL, we have a bunch of exciting things we’ve been working on, some of which have already been announced and some of which are still in the planning stages and I can’t really share quite yet. But this means we’ve had to buckle down on our workflow and try to work ahead on a majority of our usual tasks.

One reason for this, which we announced earlier this month, is that we’ve extended our release schedule! Various teams worked VERY hard to see this to fruition, and the translation team is also very excited about it, but it meant our workflow got pushed a month forward so all the covers, volume data, and descriptions would be ready in time for the pages to go live much earlier. As those who frequent our site already know, we used to have our “upcoming” calendar only for a couple weeks out, and so final files were made to that calendar. Now, you get two full months on the first of every month!

So we’ve essentially sped up our entire translation, editing, and checking process to get stuff out to you guys more quickly. This is a really great change, and something we received a lot of feedback requesting, so we don’t mind the forward push at all. But it means we’ve had to focus entirely on our “main” job of localization, quality checks, and project management rather than focusing on “side” tasks like social media and interacting with our users.

Which has admittedly been a bit sad, since getting to interact with the BL community is generally the most rewarding part of the job. 😭

We’ve also been working on tweaking our translation style guide, since we’ve received feedback that shows our current style guide isn’t always meeting the needs of our reader base. I’m not sure when this switch-over will be, since we don’t want to muddy the waters even more when we’re already incredibly busy, but hopefully this is something Renta! users can look forward to further down the line!

Over the last year we’ve been trying to spend more time and attention on market research and community outreach. This is another really fun part of the job, but it also takes up a surprising amount of time putting together surveys, talking to other industry professionals, reading feedback, talking to Renta! users, and reading lots and lots of opinions on manga. Still, we’ve really appreciated having the opportunity to chat with more and more BL fans and Renta! users who give us feedback on the site and insights into the western BL fandom—which we’re usually a bit divorced from, being all the way in Tokyo. We’re hoping we can continue to boost this outreach in the future, and have been spending a lot of time thinking about how we can contribute to building community within our userbase. Please let us know if you have any requests or suggestions, since the point of building community is having something our users can enjoy. 😊 Hopefully, we have more exciting stuff for everyone on the horizon.

For now, it’s already time to start planning for Citrus Con 2026 again! 😱 For those who don’t know, Citrus Con has been moved to late February/early March to avoid overlap with all the summer conventions. (Thank goodness, since we have to commute on the weekend and this makes it two less days we have to come in to work during the awful summer humidity…) I’ll be honest: we’re not sure what to do our panel on this year, since we’ve been too busy to brainstorm and want to avoid overlapping too much with previous panel topics (both of which you can watch on Citrus Con’s official YouTube channel). Also, while we’re glad everyone seemed to like the BL Sugoroku, that would probably also be boring two years in a row, so let us know if there are other games you’d like BL Team to play. (Perhaps something more interactive?) We could also do a more chatty Q&A type panel or similar…

We’re also hoping we can go back to AnimeNYC next year, though I can’t make any promises yet! We also received a lot of invites to go to other conventions, which made us feel very loved. 😳 Sadly, since we’re based in Japan it’s a bit difficult to go to multiple in-person conventions so we’ll probably have to keep it at one of the larger in-person conventions each year. Still, we’re thinking of ways we can improve the experience and interact with more of our users, since it was often pretty crowded at the table—including stuff like like after-hours BL get-togethers, meet-ups, or other events.

tl;dr, we’ve been busy because we’re continuing to look for ways we can give back to the community, and trying our best to make Renta! a website and service worth supporting! 💪

Still, all of BL Team has been sad this means we haven’t had much time to push some of my favorite series. (Though Sou has been doing their best keeping some recommendations going on Bluesky, as well as the weekly freebies!) There are a lot of BL the team has REALLY been enjoying working on lately and we want to share our love for those series a lot more regularly. We’ve been buried in quality-checking BL for hours on end each day, so it’s it’s killing us to not share our love for these series on a larger scale.

There’s also a ton of REALLY great series waiting in the wings, too, that we can’t wait to share with everyone! So please keep an eye out as we head into 2026!

Hopefully things will calm down a bit during this next work term and we’ll be back to sharing more reviews, being more interactive, and sharing lots about BL manga and culture again!