Forum › any good yuri on alice books?
hi all,
I found this website https://alice-books.com/ because a jp artist I follow posted their doujin on there. It's kind of hard to navigate and I really wanted to buy some yuri doujin while I was at it since shipping is always a killer. Any recommendations on how to narrow down the search? I've tried typing in my fave artists from here but it pulls up no results because, well, it's in english lol.
TLDR if anyone has yuri doujin or illustration book recommendations to buy on alice-books please let me know!! thank you!!
edit: they have a "gay" category but all I've seen there is BL .. alas
last edited at Dec 21, 2023 7:36PM
I've never used that site (it does look pretty overwhelming!) and don't have any recs, but here's a search for the yuri tag if it helps. You can usually get the original title of a translated work from Mangaupdates: it's usually listed under the "Associated Names" section (along with any alternative translated titles). I usually just google the scanlators' title + mangaupdates out of laziness. You can grab the author name from MU too, or from Pixiv/Twitter links on the artist page here. I was able to pick a random work on Alice Books & paste the circle name into the search to pull it back up again, so searching the circle/author name should work as long as it's the right one.
If the works are available elsewhere, Amazon Japan is very simple to search and purchase in English, as is Booth. In my experience, most others (like Melonbooks), while having a wider selection of doujin works than Amazon, are about on par with Alice Books - small parts of the site are translated, but searching and ordering are tricky without Japanese knowledge.
last edited at Dec 22, 2023 12:16AM
Pairing/gender tags: ♂×♂, ♂×♀, ♀×♀ (works without any romance/shipping don't have a pairing tag)
Circle list: https://alice-books.com/circles (if you only know the romanization, look up the kanji they go by on their social media or website or on mangaupdates)
There doesn't seem to be any point in searching for more specific things if you only want yuri as any gxg/yuri/rezu terms seem secondary to the pairing and there's not that much to browse, but if you're interested in the technical side: there's "genre" (pretty much whether it's original content or based on a specific franchise like Final Fantasy or Spiderman or Idolmaster, though "furry" is here too), "tag" (it's anything else the items are tagged with, like the circle/author or work themes, but the themes seem optional and can be any word/phrase the author wants, hence more specific searches will miss things) and "keyword" search (via the search box at the top or most of the suggestions in the side panel) which tries to find the search phrase in the former two.
Genre-only search: by clicking on genre name in search results or on individual item pages
Circle-only search: by clicking on circle name in search results or on individual item pages (the latter does a "tag" search instead but I doubt it matters); the list of all circles linked above
Tag-only search: by clicking on tags on individual item pages
The keyword search is probably preferred (say, to find both "apple", "apple pie", "apple juice" and "no apples here" tags when you search for "apple"), but if you want to search for a specific word and only that because it's included in other words you don't want (for example "app" without getting any apples or even "application"), find a work that already has such a tag and click on it, or do a keyword search and then replace "keyword" with "tag' in browser's address bar.
The side panel is likely a translated list of keyword searches popular among foreigners and 野郎 that "gay" links to is for hunky (gay) men (more specifically, it returns works tagged with Yarou Fest convention dedicated to them). The Japanese language version has different suggestions and more of them.
last edited at Dec 22, 2023 12:55AM
Thank you both so much for your insight !!! happy holidays !!