Kadokawa x My Anime List Writing Contest

[Piisfun]

Grand Prize — $5,000 USD
Winners: 1
Your novel will be scheduled for publication by KADOKAWA in Japan as a light novel, subject to KADOKAWA’s final approval.

Yeah, no. What kind of bullshit contest it is if judges are not the ones deciding whether you win the GRAND PRIZE or not. I won't pretend like this contest is bad. You have a chance of earning 3k$ for 50-80k words. And you don't even have to pay entry fee, that's a sweet deal for someone who writes fast. But at the same time it's a fucking clickbait. You won't get published, you have a chance to get published.

If it's anything like what they've done with their competition through J-Novel Club, what that actually means is they may simply not give out a grand prize at all, if they don't have anything they like well enough.

It isn't just isekai specifically, all categories of Japanese light novels being translated to English are down.
Part of that is because of a massive romantic comedy boom in Japan, and it has been proven that they don't sell well at all in English because they rely too much on niche cultural tropes.
Put simply, they want more foreign market in English, and they have decided that the only way they are going to get it is to push writing competitions in other countries, so they are sponsoring several of them now.