[My apologies for the delay. A friendly neighborhood flu bug decided that I really needed to sleep 18 hours, on both Friday and Saturday — since it managed to convice my immune system to go along, I didn’t have much choice in the matter.]

While the previous column fragment (part one) was just a re-hash of things other, smarter guys had to say on manga licenses and corporate entanglements, I did have a reason for linking to and quoting those chunks of both the original interview (John Ledford, of ADV) and Simon’s commentary (that’s Simon Jones, of Icarus Publishing). (no, it’s not because I’m lazy… … OK so I had two reasons.) I wanted to make note of the Ledford interview and a few of his points, as background, before we waded into a related issue: Once you have a product — licensed from Japan or otherwise — how do you sell it?

While there is always the internet, and the dedicated comic book shops are still an important part of the market, for many publishers of graphic novels (including manga) the real trick is to get their books into the book stores.

The bigger the store the better. This is why folks like Jim Killen and the buyer-formerly-known-as Kurt Hassler are such big figures in the industry. (Kurt was the #1 guy, according to a poll; Jim made that list too, at #5)

If you can convince one guy (or gal) who happens to be a buyer for a chain to stock your book, you immediately have access to 1000 outlets. Once there, your volume might find 100,000 eyeballs; out of the 50,008 people who will see your manga, maybe 500 people buy it. That’d be just a 1% conversion rate — and that assumes that your comic is brand new and unknown; if your name is Hyoe Narita or Hidemi Fukuhara, then your business model is more like: step 1, publish more Naruto, …, step 3, swim in gold coins 6 metres deep in your Money Bin just outside Duckburg.

The fast track into the store and onto the shelf is to strike a deal with a book publisher, or an experienced book distributor. Not only will a top-5 book publisher get your foot in the door at the big three (Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-a-Million), it will open up a whole new world of smaller chains and independents because you’ll be able to piggyback your books on bestsellers and pulp mass-market titles. It comes in the same box as the rest of their order, and can be returned just as easily — which is a big selling point to a book store.

This idea of returns makes booksellers much more willing to carry unproven titles, but has it’s own headache for publishers — there is the lovely concept of “Reserve against Returns” which means that you don’t see your money right away when dealing with the book market, and that you may not see all of your money for quite some time.

If you deal with Diamond for the direct market, then when you sell it, the stores are stuck with it. Diamond might relax the rules if a comic book house also decides to accept returns on one or two marquee titles, but that’s the rare exception. Mostly, if something sounds good but tanks, you’re screwed.

(Mr. Moran or anyone else from a comic shop is welcome to correct me on that)

My store also deals with Diamond, but with Diamond Books, not their comic division — so for us they follow the bookstore rules. This is how we get Dark Horse graphic novels… when we get them. (What, you think I’d let an opportunity to rag on DH for missing release dates go by?) Actually, this is a pretty good deal for Diamond’s clients, because they get to play both sides of the street. Diamond isn’t the most effective player in the book stores, but they are playing, and as they hire more talent and both DBD and both sides of their customer base get used to the relationship I expect big things. (didn’t I mention Diamond’s client list? Here, I’ll spell it out for folks who didn’t follow the link: Diamond represents manga publishers ADV, DMP–including June & 801, Dr. Master, Go! Comi, Graphic-Sha, Seven Seas, & Udon — plus maybe some I haven’t heard of yet.) Between the cumulative backlist of their clients and the inroads they’ve already made, this is a set of business relationships to watch.

Diamond is the 4th place player when it comes to manga, though, even with all the manga at their disposal. And they don’t yet register with bookstores as a distributor yet. Who are the top 3 players? It’s Viz, Tokyopop, and Del Rey, but not in the order you’d think.

Let’s review the the deals and alliances, but we’ll rank them not by the manga company sales, but by the market share of their distribution partner:

• #1 Random House, has a deal with Kodansha, and has repurposed a venerable sci-fi imprint, Del Rey, to publish manga
• #2 HarperCollins, signed a deal with Tokyopop last year. Though both HC & Tokyopop lack a direct line into Japan, not only are they making the most of the HC teen backlist — so far there’s The Warriors and Avalon High, just for starters — the new joint publications play directly into T-Pop’s tradition of OEL and “Global” manga.
• #3 Simon & Schuster distributes Viz, a company owned in largest part by Japanese publishers Shogakukan and Shueisha. As noted above, at least for right now, Viz has a license to print money (not just Naruto, but also Bleach and Death Note– and whatever else is in the pipe).
• #4 Penguin — is out of the loop. I guess they’re too busy selling College Prep study guides to the kids that make up the manga market. The closest so far that Penguin/Putnam trade has approached manga are some Kaplan vocabulary books — but manga isn’t a target yet for this Pearson subsidiary, which has a focus on classics and educational titles. (One supposes that a deal with Pearson is the next tough nut to crack)
• #5 Hachette USA (more recently the Time Warner Book Group, before the buyout) is the source of much anticipation in the biz, with the announcement of Yen Press, one of only a few in-house USA publishers — we’ll see what happen when Yen titles actually hit the shelves.

I found the rankings at the blog of the guy who runs the #6 company. (At least, that’s their claim) Surprisingly, when I started an internet search, a simple ranking like this was the hardest set of facts to nail down.

Before we leave the rankings, let’s check in with Scholastic. That’s number 10 on Mr. Hyatt’s list, and by their own admission they’ve sold four million graphic novels through bookfairs in the past 3 years. That’s through bookfairs (a classic strategy for Scholastic, and exclusive of sales they do through stores like mine). That’s a lot of Captain Underpants but still… four million. Dude. Who says the comic book market is dead?

If you claim that we can’t sell comics, then obviously you’re selling the wrong king of comics. Not that I’m specifically calling out Marvel and DC, but both “major” comic book players should take notice: Scholastic serves kids, a demographic you’ve abandoned — even if one were to write off the manga market, once you take Scholastic into account, all of a sudden the OEL picture is all kinds of different. And if you think it’s all just piddling kiddy books, well, Jeff Smith’s Bone is a pretty good argument that traditional funny book publishers need to watch their ass. Four million of anything is a hell of a lot, let alone “illustrated stories aimed at children”. DC and Marvel may have already lost in the comics business and not even realized it yet. Manga is the banging down the door, too:
(from the Wall Street Journal)

The manga category is expanding quickly. Total sales of manga books jumped 22% to 9.5 million units in 2006 from 7.8 million a year earlier, according to Nielsen BookScan, which collects point-of-sale information from 6,500 retail locations across the country, including those operated by Borders Group Inc. and Barnes & Noble Inc. The manga category in 2006 accounted for about two-thirds (68.5%) of all graphic novels sold in U.S. bookstores, up from slightly more than half (53.8%) in 2004, according to Nielsen BookScan. (The figures don’t include comic-book stores.)

The “squeeze play” (and heck, wiki is even more informative than I’d hoped they’d be on this topic) is a desperation play when you have good position but poor prospects. I’ll differ with wikipedia on this point; when I chose the heading as my topic, I was thinking of something more along the lines of a rundown or “pickle”, a runner caught between two bases, either of which can tag him out.

While manga is a growing business, now it’s also big business. For a small publisher, first you need to get the license to a hot property (if it’s available, or if you can identify a new work–in English or otherwise–that will appeal the the fans) and then you need to get it into the stores. The Squeeze comes first from business relationships (either ownership or partnerships) that have the biggest Japanese manga publishers tied up, then second from distribution agreements that give bigger English manga publishers a direct line to book store shelves. A smaller press has to rely on the skills of their distributor and the vagaries of national graphic novel buyers to actually find shelf space at a big store. While manga sections are still growing, eventually places like Borders and Barnes & Noble will stop the expansion, and then things might get ugly.

4 out of the top 5 book distributors (who, don’t forget, are also publishers in their own right) are either pushing their own manga, or hawking someone else’s line. Diamond is a good fallback (or Perseus, or Consortium) but you will always just be a third tier vendor to the bookstore market — able to make some inroads but without any clout. If you have good publicity (like say, Bechtel’s Fun Home) then there is money to be made, but many unrecognised creators will be grinding it out in the shadows.

It’s not pretty. Outside of Del Rey, Viz, Tokyopop, and the newly established Yen Press, no one has a guaranteed line into the bookstore market. (Not that anything is really guaranteed — but my guess is that when a buyer hears about something new from a huge media company, it might mean a little more than the same book coming from a small press)
I’ll finish up by noting that selling books is a noble calling, but still a business: if we can make a buck, we’ll do it. All arguments go out the window if the customer demand is there. If suddenly every 14 year old decides they must have copies of Blood Alone, then we’ll stock it and make the strongest request we can for the publisher to print more — anything can happen (maybe with a TV tie in…) but for now it looks like Naruto and Warriors have got this chunk of the market locked up.

##

Oh, we’ve a whole mess of links…
Further Readings and references:

• The link above to the Top 5 US publishers was found via google on Eion Purcell’s blog
• I would have compared the current manga market to the the enclosure movement of the commons in 1600-1800s England. Except I couldn’t manage the academic argument.
• Newsarama: Money, Manga, and the Teen Girl Market
• The other big publisher: Disney, twice over.
• Boom Studios signs with Perseus, 5 June — link
• As noted: ADV’s John Ledford in an interview with ANN, 30 May 2007.
• ICv2 on the Sojitz investment in ADV, 27 June 2006
• Tokyopop signs with Harper Collins, 27 March 2006 — link
• …and commentary from PW Comics Week the following day — link
• …and Tokyopop’s Mike Kiley on the topic, via ICv2 — link
• Viz/Simon & Schuster, from June 2004, renewed and expanded 11 January 2006 — link
• Del Rey, from May 2004 — link
• Hachette, Yen Press, from 24 February 2007 — link
• Holtzbrinck/First Second: I didn’t say anything in the column above, but I need to note them anyway — link
• Consortium picks up DramaQueen, CPM, via MangaCast 27 September 2006 — link
• Broccoli signs with Perseus, 8 March, via ICv2 — link
• Once over, and in case they update while I’m not looking: the Diamond client list — link, as of 10 June 2007: ADV, DMP (including June & 801), Dr. Master, Go! Comi, Graphic-Sha, Seven Seas, Udon… and you know, Dark Horse, Image, and a couple of other funny-book publishers.
• Media Consolidation: Link
• old, but good points: 13 Feb 2006: Edward Wyatt @ The New York Times, as achived at the International Herald Tribune
• even older: 20 October 2003, Judith Rosen, Publisher’s Weekly