[a follow-up in spirit to this post]

An aside: Hiatus

You might have noticed, the heretofore-weekly manga bestsellers are late. (really late)

I didn’t post the online bestsellers yesterday — and I’m not posting anything today either, in keeping with my new year’s resolution to post nothing to the blog.

…but I’ve got a lot to say about that nothing.

Let me just start off by saying the online sales charts (including, I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, the mid-month Graphic Novel chart which is 13 days late and isn’t going to post this month) will be returning in 2 weeks. Why take a break? My sources are changing. While the addition of a single site in the past hasn’t ground the whole process to a halt before, this is actually pretty big:

Border’s sales website will emerge from beta in less than a week.

As noted in Friday’s post, the Borders online sales site will soon actually be Borders — and for the first time since April of 2001, not just a decal atop the Amazon bookstore — starting on Sunday.

For those of you who don’t know, the fiscal year (the calendar used for accounting and tax purposes) for almost all retailers runs from February to January — basically the same as a calendar year but offset by one month after the holiday season to account for customer returns, and to allow the post-holiday sales and clearances to reduce inventory before they have to pay taxes on it.

Usually, there would be no reason for you to know or care that some corporate accountant won’t close the books on 2007 until 2 February 2008, but if you’re an investor keeping an eye on the book business (or a publisher, or an avid online shopper, or a Border’s competitor) then you might take note of the date.

Border’s deal with Amazon has expired (or rather, will expire in 6 days) and as part of their new strategic plan, Border’s is taking control of their online destiny. I’m making a big deal out of this because, hell, it’s a big deal. Borders hasn’t been trumpeting the news up and down the virtual corridors because I think under the deal with Amazon they can’t, yet, but this is going to be a big story next week. (a big deal for booksellers, anyway; the rest of you will no doubt be breathlessly following the developing story as it is revealed Mary Kate played Cathy Smith to Heath’s Belushi*)

*this is pure fiction. I think. At least, I just invented it, but it may be printed as ‘fact’ in you favourite flavour of tabloid soon. And if you get the reference without resorting to Wikipedia you’re old.

This isn’t a panacea that will suddenly save the company, so don’t bet mom’s retirement nest egg on BGP (or on any retail stocks; 2008 is going to be a rough year) but this is a move in the right direction. Additional links are in last Friday’s post; watch Border’s Beta Site and Borders.com this weekend.

##

Musings on the online business, my own methodology — and why it became a unmanageable time sink, and more on the Character of Sources.

If we were to consider the Manga Top 100 as a one-time experiment, then I’d have to call it a success. I’ve got a lot of data to consider — including the input from various sources over a Q4 holiday shopping season, along with a week-to-week record of the Fall ‘08 Naruto Sales Putsch. And I’m happy with some of the things I’ve been able to discover. (Even if you aren’t capturing the data to fuel a overwrought and unwieldly spreadsheet you should take a half hour to look at top-selling manga on a sales site or five; it’s very informative.)

The addition of a single source when I already consider 11 — and when the Borders Beta is already in the mix — might not seem like a good reason to put the charts on hold. What difference should it make, right?

Well I’m taking this as an opportunity to rework the charts, reconsider my methods, to be a little more selective in the sites I use for my input, and to dig a little deeper into the sources of good information that I’ve found to date.

First up, and this will sound counterintuitive: Amazon has to go.

Obviously I can’t drop Amazon. They sell too much stuff; any consideration of online sales has to include Amazon. That’s the whole problem, though: Amazon sells stuff, not books, and as I’ve previously noted (in discussing graphic novel sales) I think the market I need to be following is not just any-ol’ online sales sites, but online booksellers.

Despite getting their start selling books, and having 14 years of experience, I still get the feeling that Amazon doesn’t understand the business. Maybe it’s that manga are too specialized a market, or Amazon is just too proud of the giant-swapmeet-style-mess of a sales site they’ve built to put much effort into their modest little bookstore.

Let’s just consider some of the “manga” for sale at Amazon:

• Indiana Jones from Dark Horse. Well, at least it’s a comic… but
• A research manual and
• a chemistry textbook?

I can cut Amazon some slack. Terms aren’t carved in stone, and I might, on a good day, be willing to concede some things are manga-ish, like say the Holms’ Babymouse series or the occasional instruction book or even a cookbook that happens to have “manga” in the title but isn’t a comic, per se. But let us consider the logic[sic] that lands a chem text in the manga rankings: Somebody, somewhere in the Amazon organization noted that this guy, Chris Hart, has done a lot of how-to books on cartooning and drawing. Quite a few of those cover manga, in fact; the most recent are in the “Manga Mania” series. Rather than add Manga Mania by itself to whatever search method they use, the quick-fix employed by this Amazon flack is to reclass any result from a search for Christopher Hart as a manga title. While stretching it a bit, I suppose it’s fine for books like Cartoon Cool and Superhero Anatomy — or stretching it a lot; these are on the very outside of acceptable — but this hack also includes, it should be noted, the Organic Chemistry book with authors Harold Hart and Christopher M. Hadad.

You might think I went out of my way to find books that “broke” Amazon’s search function. I wish. I know about all of these titles (every last one of the books linked to above) because they came up on an Amazon Top 100 Manga list.

Oh, and No Hard Feelings, Chris. I used your name as an example because you sell a lot of stuff. Tough place to be, I know.
;) And Good Luck with The Reformed; I’ve been looking forward to it.

##

I can’t ignore Amazon (…yet) but I’m going to shift my focus away to other sales sites — online booksellers — as much as I can.

I had been spending as much as 10 hours a week (through December) to compile the rankings; which is a bit too much. I was burning out. It’s a giant time-sink, and to be honest, it felt like a prime example of diminishing returns — Just how big of a chunk of the market does my method pull up anyway?

The last time I looked at the big sales picture (15 September) among other things I found data to support the estimate that 1% of all book sales were graphic novels, and of that about 60% is manga …by sales. If I were to pull some numbers out of my ass and posit that most graphic novels are ~$15 while manga volumes sell for ~$10, then we get much closer to a 50-50 split, book for book. [edit-  oops, bad math.  reverse that:  IF GNs are $15 and manga volumes $10, then manga is outselling GNs by 2 to 1, give or take] Which is where we were at last year; I won’t know about 2007 for a couple months yet.

Without tossing too many millions about and sticking to round fractions: B&N, Amazon, & Borders (ranked 1-2-3) amount to a rough third of all book sales. Online sales make up about a tenth, which is handy for the math so I’m going with that estimate.

So online manga? 60% of one tenth of one percent of $35billion equals… a number that seems too large: $21 million.

Let me attack it from another angle.

Theoretical Big Box Books (trading as TBBB) has exactly 1000 outlets and does exactly $5 billion in gross sales each year. That’s an average of $5M a store; my store does more than that but we’re not talking about my store (lest I get fired), we’re talking about Big Box Books.

Through their outlets TBBB does between one-half to one percent of their business in graphic novels. That’s less than the 1% estimate for the book market as a whole, but let’s use that .5% figure as typical for our average big-box store.

Out of $5million in overall sales, our typical TBBB store sells $25,000 worth of graphic novels, of which $15,000 is the manga. On a store-by-store basis, that means your local TBBB is selling 1500 volumes of manga and about 1660 graphic novels annually. Give or take. Say, 30 volumes of manga plus another 33 non-manga GNs a week. And of course we’re not talking about my store, lest I get fired but my educated opinion is that these numbers look more or less correct. To further generalise and compound the math errors, that’d be about 6 manga a week –hell, call it one a day– for every million dollars in annual sales.

That’s what we’re dealing with: One neighborhood store, $1M in annual sales, one stinking book a day. Gotta love this business.

(Using the same math…) The TBBB flagship location on Well-Known Boulevard in Gotham does 50 mil a year and so might clear a quarter million in annual graphic novel sales — they’re selling more than a thousand manga a month. The theoretical-books.com website does $500M in sales each year, and would sell at least 400 manga a day.

Wow. 400 manga a day. Impressive- but there are 6000 manga volumes in print (13,000 if you count like Amazon does) so that’s just a drop in the bucket — less, in fact, when one considers how many of these would be volumes of Naruto or Death Note. And of course, all these numbers are OomA* so who knows what bearing they might have on reality.

(Pointless thought experiments like these are only part of the reason I haven’t been posting the Consolidated Online Sales Rankings. This certainly isn’t helping, tho.)

##

Sales Site Zed (sszed.com, because the yanks still can’t pronounce ‘Z’) (oh, yeah, still theoretical because I’m not done with this train of thought yet) is a smaller but successful internet retailer (…and so, doubly theoretical) that only does a tenth of the business of the online arm of TBBB — call it $50M in annual sales, or just a skosh more than a brick-and-mortar ‘flagship’ bookstore in places like downtown Gotham, or Metropolis, or any of the Keystone, Midway, Gateway, Central & Star Cities. Anyway… so 40 manga a day, maybe 300 total in a good week — and I’ve been spending a fair chunk of my days off worrying over the sales from sites like SSZed, and even going so far as to load up their Top 100 Bestsellers. If they’re selling 300 volumes a week, and most of those (say 10 copies each of 20-25 volumes) are just Death Note and Naruto, then

What in the hell is the point?

The #100 book? It’s the title that has sold one volume in the past month, raising it ever so slightly, ever so briefly above the baseline of its backlist brethren.

Eventually I may drop the more marginal sites. Tower? Brand recognition, yes, but your sales are in toilet (overall sales, to say nothing of book sales, of which manga is just a chunk). Virgin seems to update once every six weeks; and besides, do they have any stores anymore? The biggest chunk of Virgin retail has been sold and is doing business as Zavvi. (not online yet; I’ve checked) Deepdiscount.com has a great top 20, but past that.. well, I personally could go over there right now and buy seven volumes of Aishiteru ze Baby and ensure that series a place on the charts for three weeks, minimum. (I bought AzB from another source, so don’t go looking for it on the DD chart)

Buy.com looks like a decent source, but suffers from the same low-volume problem. Good site, though. Fye is excellent: 800+ real-world sales outlets, a decent online site, a history (by way of Suncoast) of manga and anime sales & customer fulfillment — except of course Fye.com doesn’t have a manga category. I’ve complained about this before, and send ‘helpful’ emails to TWE once a month or so, but it still boggles my mind that — given that Manga is the top 20% and more of their bestseller list, mind you — “manga” is not a browsable category but “medieval fiction” is. I’m as glad as the next guy that English Majors are finding employment, no honest, but you might want to hire a few geeks to help you run your website, Fye. I’m just saying.

In the end, I keep coming back to Book Stores, and the sites from major booksellers: B&N, Chapters, Books-a-Million; to a lesser degree Powell’s; the new Border’s site is still a cipher but one I’m willing to bet on, and of course the bastards at Amazon.

The new mix is 2/3 booksellers.

a top 250 manga from
B&N (x3)
Borders (x3)
BAMM
Chapters
& Amazon (using the Amazon keyword search)
[9×250 = 2250]

a top 100 from
Amazon (x3) (using the Amazon hourly bestseller lists)
buy.com
deepdiscount.com
Powells
[100×6 = 600]

and a top 50 from
Fye
Tower
Virgin
[150]

The sum total is a nice, round 3000. That’ll last for, like, a week before I start tinkering with it again. Nothing is dropped (yet) but my time is valuable. Perform for me or get the axe.

by percentage:

B&N, Borders: 25% each
Borders doesn’t quite match B&N dollar for dollar, but most of us would agree that they sell more manga.

Amazon: 18.3%
BAMM, Chapters: 8.3%
Buy, DD, Powells: 3.3%
Fye, Tower, Virgin: 1.6%

##

A top 10… sort of.

Feel like I’ve left you in the lurch? Jonesing for a top 10 fix?

I could chug through 3 or 4 weeks of numbers, but the top 10 series have been pretty damn stable of late. At least through the Fall, these 8 are always in the top 10 or 12, and in roughly this order:

Naruto
Death Note
Fruits Basket
Bleach
Vampire Knight
Fullmetal Alchemist
Pokemon
Kingdom Hearts

With the exception of Death Note, these are ongoing series (I count Chain of Memories and KH II as part of the Kingdom Hearts series) and of course there is the odd multi-platform critter that is the Pokemon Marketing Machine –which manages to keep “Best of Pokemon Adventures” in print and in many sales sites’ top 50. Of course, Death Note is on CN, and the TV exposure is only doing good things for those sales. The upcoming release of “Death Note 13″ won’t hurt either.

Past these… we can add a similar slate of second tier titles, and a couple of odd-ball single volumes:

Erin Hunter’s Warriors
Berserk
Yotsuba&!
Negima!
Gentlemen’s Alliance†
Ouran High School Host Club
Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Absolute Boyfriend
Hana-Kimi
#
Dark Hunger — Feehan
Making Comics — McCloud

The placement of the second rank on the top series chart is often dependent on the strong initial performance of the latest new volume: they don’t always make the top 10, but they peak with each release. The success of that comic-book adaptation of Christine Feehan’s short story continues to boggle: I don’t know who is buying it, but I hope that at least a few of them can overlook the shortcomings of that book and will eventually move on to better manga. (The manga is fine; that particular story sucks. [*SPOILER*] when I got to the part where the story goes like, well he may be a vampire but she’s a were-jaguar… I’m not getting that hour back. Or my $10.)

Scott McCloud’s book is excellent. It’s not even manga, but I’ve never begrudged it a place in these charts.