(commentary on the aggregate online sales rankings of manga and manga series for last week)
Note: no actual recipes listed. There’s a link, though.

I wasn’t joking last week when I made the off-hand comment that I should just outsource (part or all) of the consolidated rankings — I mean, a lot of the process is just checking websites, followed by furious data entry, and only after repeating that step twenty-some-odd times do we then get to the essential bit. Anyone could do the data entry for me — even someone in India — but they’re charging the same amount per hour (roughly) that *I* make from the bookstore.

…actually, that depresses me a bit.

…so anyway — yeah, no need to hire someone to do the data entry for me. Yet. And the list went up on Sunday per usual, even if my commentary is a day and a half late.

This week I mitigated the time-sink involved by combining one involved and complex activity (you’re reading it) with another — in this case, a batch of chili. Chili is actually a very easy recipe but if you add beans (blasphemy, I know) and cook beans from scratch (which if you have to add beans is the only way to go) then you automatically have a process that requires passive monitoring (but not active involvement) for a few hours, so one could theoretically, *easily* make a two gallon batch of chili while sitting at the kitchen table doing something silly like churning through my lists, figuring out what I should be commenting on.

In case you missed it: That’s what I’m doing.

My kitchen smells awesome right now, btw. (The secret ingredients are 4 different kinds of beans, a little sweet corn, extra tomatoes, and a jar of spagetti sauce; and I’ve already said too much… older variations on this recipe have been blogged extensively somewhere, if only one bothers to search for it…) (OK, so if it makes you feel better you can call my chili “spicy bean soup” — but only if you then call my Pot Roast recipe “chili” — that sucker is nothing but meat, meat, meat, chili powder, cayenne, garlic, a little onion, some secret spices, and more meat.)

Tonight We Feast Like Kings. And after dinner, some anime (old skool: Maison Ikkoku), but between now and then I suppose I need to actual write something on the manga.

Enough intro.
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Welcome!
New number ones — first volumes appearing on the chart this week

• If we’re talking about “ones” then it would be remiss not to mention this book given it’s title: One from Tokyopop, a manhwa about rock stars and the trials of stardom. While not a first volume, the eleventh and final volume is a new release, coming next week. The last number ‘One’ came in at #240 on the chart on the strength of preorders.
• King of Thorn (#213), also from Tokyopop, is a future dystopia with monsters and mysteries and a girl in glasses and violence and a 17+ rating. Woohoo! …I have no idea what it’s about.
• Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (#164) is set in a dark and shadowy present where some sensitive students (not that kind of sensitive; think esper) set up a moving business. As you might guess from the title (and the fact that it’s Dark Horse — horror manga is one of their métiers) these college kids aren’t moving furniture. Unlike DH, horror isn’t my thing so I haven’t read this manga, though the apparent dark humour might just win me over. –Assuming that there is humor; that may just be an artefact of the too-short back cover blurbs written with an eye towards getting you to buy the manga.
• Heavy stuff this week: Missing, vol 1 (tied for #164… ooooo spooky). Still not my cup of chai though this one looks to be a bit lighter while still remaining ‘darkly atmospheric’ (that’s code for: ‘never explains anything for 700 pages’) OK, What’s next?
• Star Trek Manga. Next.
• Strawberry 100%, #259 on the chart. Ah, finally, a sweet slice-of-life high school comedy where a boy falls in love with a pair… of… [sigh]. From Viz, rated 16+. Next time, Junpei? At least try to notice something like hair colour, or her face, or even her bust size — and not just the stylish print on her knickers.
• Tenshi Ja Nai (I’m No Angel) — runs 8 volumes, and like One, above, is a complete series (the last volume released in September) but unlike the Tokyopop title, we’re considering “I’m no Angel” because volume one is back on the chart, and ranking respectably at #123. Quick take: Girl (our heroine) rooms with Idol at an all-girls boarding school. The Idol, though, is actually a guy-pretending-to-be-a-girl (standard manga plot twist #18) — and even the for-the-sake-of-showbiz angle has been done before and since. (CMX’s Penguin Revolution springs to mind). Lest any fan of Takako Shigematsu despair, you should know that Go! Comi is also publishing her “King of the Lamp”. Incidentally, King of the Lamp appears on the list at #240.
• Yen out globals Tokypop? Exhibit A: the book, Y Square. Provenance: Korean-born German Artist draws manga for US imprint Yen press, ultimately owned by French mega-publisher Hachette Livre. But wait, there’s more! The book stars characters named Yoshitaka and Yagate — a couple of High School guys in Japan — who are presumably the y-squared of the title. Lest one presume too much and think that y * y = yaoi (which might otherwise be a safe assumption in this context) it seems that Yoshitaka needs a little help with the ladies and turns to classmate Yagate for advice. Well, it is rated for ‘older teen’… so… ah. um. OK, time for research: even though I’m not familiar with the the book, a look at a interview with Kurt Hassler at Yaoisuki seems to point to this having a mild BL aspect, maybe one just played for laughs. Originally published for the German market, my guess is that this reads left-to-right (unless orig. publisher Carlsen does it backwards on purpose, like Seven Seas.) (oh, and #293 on the chart — that’s tied for last place with 4 other books)

There are also some single volume manga (Ba_ku, Crushing Love, Cute Beast, Dash!, From Up Above, Ka Shin Fu, Little Darling, Love a la Carte, Mw, Pet on Duty, Sensitive Pornograph, The Crimson Spell, The Sky Over My Spectacles, & Time Lag) (assuming those are single volume manga and not just vol. 1s of new series I’ve never heard of) but maybe I’ll save these orphans for next week. Assuming they’re still on the charts. Next!

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max Δx
or should that be Δy? Do cartesian coördinate systems apply to bestseller charts?

↑ 179 - Love*Com 3 (294 → 115)
↑ 169 - +Anima 1 (257 → 88)
↑ 114 - Ghost in the Shell 1.5 (278 → 164)
↑ 110 - Bleach 3 (190 → 80)
↑ 83 - The Crimson Spell (265 → 182)
↑ 80 - Naruto 7 (195 → 115)
↑ 80 - Bleach 2 (147 → 67)
↑ 78 - Pumpkin Scissors 1 (163 → 85)
↑ 74 - ES: Eternal Sabbath 7 (147 → 73)
↑ 72 - S.A (Special A) 1 (156 → 84)

↓ 84 - Bleach 5 (156 → 240)
↓ 89 - Gunslinger Girl 5 (128 → 217)
↓ 99 - I Luv Halloween 1 (122 → 221)
↓ 109 - Buso Renkin 9 (87 → 196)
↓ 114 - Naruto 11 (82 → 196)
↓ 115 - Hellsing 2 (151 → 266)
↓ 116 - Vampire Hunter D (manga) 1 (93 → 209)
↓ 118 - Japanese in Mangaland (168 → 286)
↓ 182 - Kingdom Hearts 2 (98 → 280)
↓ 192 - Pet on Duty (67 → 259)

I’ll be figuring velocities and accellerations next. I was a physics major for three and a half years; the v and a integrals are just Week One of the particle dynamics lecture. (Of course, I majored in everything at one time or another in college…)
(I kid. I don’t plan to bring the calculus to bear on this particular problem. ever.)

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So, what else about the list isn’t apparent at first glance?

Well, these you know:

38. ( ↑ 43) Kingdom Hearts vols 1-4 box set
48. ( ↑ 79) Kingdom Hearts Chain of Memories vols 1-2 box set

They’ve been knocking around for weeks. …these you can’t see:

174. ( ↓ 118) Demon Ororon Ultimate Edition
182. Sgt. Frog Collection, vols 1-3 omnibus
234. ( ↓ 230) Ai Land Chronicles Omnibus
245. Fruits Basket vols 1-4 box set

…mostly because I arbitrarily cut the list off at 100. On top of the titles above, we can add in the Ultimate Editions of Battle Royale, Fruits Basket, & Warcraft (the Warcraft book is the whole trilogy in a spiffy hardcover) along with one you might have missed from this past June, the Rayearth Omnibus (that’s vols 1-3 of the first Rayearth) in a $10 edition. Yeah, old school CLAMP, and not necessarily their best outing, but did I mention $10? It’s like 1⅔¢ a page. Tokyopop was either testing the waters, or maybe just took the money from some bargain outfit that wanted to reprint the books, and ran.

I think we can see that at least one revenue source Tokyopop is pursuing is re-packaging the backlist and seeing if there are some old fans looking to ‘upgrade’ while also capturing new fans for ongoing series, while also providing customers some solid values on collected editions of shorter, older properties that weren’t going to sell anymore in the traditional formats anyway. It’s not exactly a growth strategy but it should work for some smaller-scale gains, as long as they don’t go overboard with it. Next!

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Naruto is all over the place.

Even taking out a few volumes (say, the top 15 Narutos) the popularity of the series is shown by their absence:

2. ( ↑ 8 ) 18 Fruits Basket (662)
5. ( ↑ 6) 1 Death Note (615)
6. ( ↓ 4) 3 Vampire Knight (532)
9. ( ↑ 17) 2 Death Note (526)
10. ( ↓ 9) 17 Fruits Basket (499)
14. ( ↑ 32) 1 Yu-Gi-Oh! GX (445)
15. ( ↑ 20) 3 Death Note (443)
18. ( ↓ 12) 1 Warriors (429)
22. ( ↓ 11) Dark Hunger — Feehan (371)
24. ( ↑ 30) 5 Death Note (349)
25. ( ↑ 42) 4 Death Note (326)
26. ( ↑ 51) 12 Death Note (307)
28. ( ↓ 26) Let’s Find Pokemon! Special Edition (279)
29. ( ↓ 23) 20 Bleach (267)
30. ( ↑ 45) 11 Death Note (260)

Half the top 10 is Naruto. Half the top 30 is Naruto. Including all the novels, art books, animanga, and even the 2008 wall calendar (which would have ranked 46th, if it were manga) then a full tenth (and a smidge) of all manga on the lists was Naruto.

Like I mentioned last week, if I really want to see the big manga picture - only without a certain fox-faced ninja - I’ll need to dig deeper into the sources. Which is, you know, work. So not right away. It may be easier just to give this some time (a year) and wait for the Naruto to go away. Naruto is so… 2007. Next!

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And the usual commentary on sources:

Books-a-million does update their manga bestsellers… only… at… a… glacially… slow… rate. And I don’t know the time frame they’re looking at, but older titles carry on and on, and on, while new titles can barely crack the bottom end of the charts. Once a book makes it at BAMM, they’re made; manga seemingly have a remarkably long half-life on the bestseller list over there. BAMM won’t be phased out as one of my sources, quite, (or at least not yet) but their data isn’t ideal.

The more I deal with Powell’s and Tower, the more I like the sites. (And the bestseller lists on the sites.) “Funky” and “Different” are why I use these sites but even so, all of my third-tier sources (Buy.com, DeepDiscount.com, Powell’s, Tower, and Virgin) (and to a lesser extent also BAMM & Chapters) suffer from the same problem: wacky data. I know that’s not a scientific term, but wacky is the only way to describe it. It is almost like any major purchase by a single customer — or perhaps, a single group of ‘net friends all buying the same thing — is enough to skew the rankings and catapult several volumes of a mid- or backlist manga title rather suddenly into a site’s top 10. While annoying, these statistical blips don’t really affect my own rankings. much.

This week, for example, even if a blatant error placed at #1 on one of these sales sites, without corroborating support from another source the manga could place no higher than 90th overall. (on a good week such titles wouldn’t even make the top 100).

One way to address the one-hit-wonders would be to not consider any title unless it appears two weeks in a row. While technically this is possible without any new major time commitments (technically, but even without more headaches it’s still 4 hours a week) there would be some time sunk in setting up the new spreadsheet. So. Not Yet.

This carry-over of data week to week wouldn’t be ideal, but it would work. I would be something like scoring for bowling, only in reverse and with books and dollars and– OK, so nothing like bowling. I’ll be making some small adjustments over coming weeks to accommodate this as a possibility (or as something akin to an “eleventh source”) but there are no major changes planned yet.

With the holiday shopping season coming up, the data from these online sales sites should be improving; this is the best time of year to consider any retail sales. Since my day job is also retail sales, this means I also have the least amount of free time to look at and consider all these interesting developments. –Since I have to make do, so do you.