Where is Aria?

At Comics Worth Reading, Johanna Draper Carlson reports having trouble getting a copy of vol. 4 of Aria. What’s up with that? I asked Tokyopop marketing director Marco Pavia if he could shed some light, and here’s what he had to say:

As for Aria vol 4, it’s sold out mainly because orders came in much higher than projected — without boring you to tears, we usually print enough to fill projections with enough extra stock for re-orders; occasionally, actual orders come in much higher than projections, which is the case with Aria volume 4. It’s a little unusual, because by volume 4, the audience is usually established, so projections from accts are fairly accurate.

So when I thought a little harder about this, I realized that ADV had published vols. 1-3 of Aria and maybe that’s why the demand was higher for vol. 4—some old fans were picking up the series again. I asked the logical question—do they plan on another printing?—and here’s Marco’s response:

It all depends upon demand—we do monitor our inventory very closely. I’m sure you can understand that we have to be very careful in this economic climate.

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Comments

  1. Not sure if i believe that TBH, since from what i was told before TP UK closed down is that Aria wasn’t selling enough across the board, and was one of the titles on the list of possible axing.

    To many of their titles are currently going out of print with no news on whether they’re going to be reprinted, and when asked it’s the vague answer they seem to love ” Depends on demand”

  2. Well, to be fair, the Amazon sales rankings paint a similar (if admittedly limited) picture:
    Aria 1 – #281,554
    Aria 2 – #251,220
    Aria 3 – #521,524
    Aria 4 – #79,791
    Aria 5 – #595,258

    Still, I suspect the print run was pretty low to begin with for all books involved, given that Aria doesn’t exactly burn up the sales charts…

  3. Need to hurry up and get one of those copies then, thank god I just saw five of them at my local Barnes & Noble. ><;

  4. Geez, this is the year of Change! Hope! Benefit of the doubt! =)

    Even if the remaining demand is sizeable, there are still good reasons TP may not want to do an immediate reprint. Perhaps their fiscal year isn’t over yet, and doing another run of Aria 4 right now would increase their taxable inventory. That’s just extra fat no publisher wants to carry in this economy, healthy or otherwise.

  5. I think something similar happened with volume three of Silver Diamond. I’d put in the pre-order at my local comics shop, but missed some sort of deadline, and were therefore unable to secure a copy. Basically, Diamond had sold out. Luckily, I’d seen two at a local Books-A-Million, so was able to get my talking snake fix. I’ve not seen Aria, Vol. 4 anywhere, though.

Trackbacks

  1. […] books (Sorry Aria fans, but the fifth volume’s among the casualties.) Speaking of which, Brigid Alverson spoke to Tokyopop marketing director Marco Pavia about the sudden sellout of Aria’s fourth […]

  2. […] me a bit when I read on this site that Tokyopop had dropped the series altogether. Upon more research, I found that the series was not dropped, but being delayed a bit and that volume 4 specifically […]