About the submission or how I go about making a light novel and uploading it here. I’m new to ichio but it seems like a upload a game thing, would I be able to just upload a word doc?
Absolutely! When you use the "create a new project" page, at the classification question you would simply have to select "book". When it comes to uploading files, itchio already accepts .txt, .pdf, .epub and I'm sure many other types of files as well. You shouldn't encounter any particular problem, but don't hesitate to ask a few more questions if you encounter problems with the upload page's interface.
Then, to submit your project as part of the jam, once it is uploaded go back to the jam's main page, click on the "submit your project" button and select it in the list.
If I've been unclear let me know!
Yup you can upload all sorts of files but preferred text format is pdf for this which you can select as a "save as"/"download as"/"export as" option in most text formatting software.
epub is also encouraged for Ereaders but that is more tricky to pull off and not required.
but if you are interested the easiest way I know of to do it is to load the word/wordx file into Caliber ( https://calibre-ebook.com/) and converting it to epub before checking it. Caliber also is great for converting word/wordX to pdf and also allows you to set a full page a4 cover art page without margins if you have one made up in jpeg/png/tiff.