Normal distribution

This* article about distribution is strictly insider baseball, but it has some interesting insights. For the uninitiated, distributors are the middlemen between publishers and retailers, although the bigger publishers have distributing arms. The article is about how several publishing houses were making pitches to distribute Tokyopop’s books.

Graphic novels generally, and manga specifically, are among the few rapidly growing areas of the publishing business, so securing the right to distribute Tokyopop’s books was a hotly contested prize.

Tokyopop ended up going with the company that bought their previous distributor. Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley, sounding like a wild and crazy guy, explains,

We looked at a lot of other options that were very much bigger than Perseus, but we needed someone who both had the technology and systems we needed to continue to grow, and who fit our business. We’re radical, crazy, teen-pop-culture guys who do a lot of wild stuff and who have to turn on a dime.

Radical and crazy in a practical, profit-seeking way, that is:

Tokyopop is looking to push manga even further into the mainstream, hoping to gain inroads into mass merchandisers, grocery stores, gift and specialty stores and other places where popular fiction and nonfiction books are sold. As such, Tokyopop says it believes the battle for manga superiority is likely to be as much a fight among distributors as it is a struggle for the best cartoonists, characters and storylines.

God help me if they start selling manga in the grocery stores. Just reserve my spot at the poorhouse now. Except I doubt they’ll put anything at Target or Stop & Shop that I didn’t buy five years ago. I’ll still have to trek to a real bookstore to get to the full line.

One side note: the article describes Tokyopop as “this country’s largest publisher of English-language manga,” which doesn’t seem right to me. Everything I’ve read seems to indicate that Viz is putting out more manga per month and selling more of it.

Oh, and this is how the New York Times describes manga: “the Japanese book-length comics larded with doe-eyed characters with chiseled good looks and hard bodies.” Aaargh!

*The article is from the New York Times but I linked to another site to avoid registration. Original NYT article is here.