QueenieChan reports that vol. 1 of The Dreaming is going to a third printing, and rather a large one: 45,000 copies. The reason: The book is being picked up by Scholastic for its book clubs. If you want an example of manga going mainstream, there it is: You can’t get any more mainstream than the Scholastic book clubs. (They’ve picked up Peach Fuzz as well.) I wonder if that’s the market the Tokyopop people have their eye on with their manga/chapter book hybrids?
Anyway, congratulations to Queenie—and to Scholastic!
About Brigid Alverson
Brigid Alverson has been reading comics since she was 4. After earning an MFA in printmaking, she headed to New York to become a famous artist but ended up working with words instead of pictures, first as a book editor and later as a newspaper reporter. She started
MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters’ reading habits and now covers manga, comics and graphic novels as a freelancer for
School Library Journal,
Publishers Weekly Comics Week,
Comic Book Resources, the
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, and
Robot 6. She also edits the
Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Now settled in the outskirts of Boston, Brigid is married to a physicist and has two daughters.
I think that this is as great a sign as it comes. When you’re in 4th or 5th grade, those scholastic book clubs ARE your bookstores. Although I’d prefer a Naruto or something on there because Shonen manga is as addictive as heroin sometimes…
Yes, the OEL manga are an interesting choice. Maybe Tokyopop has better connections with Scholastic than Viz does.
This is the best form of viral marketing there is—a kid picks up the book at the school book fair or orders it from the flyer because it looks attractive and has paper dolls inside (kids love extras) and pretty soon everyone is reading it. Upping the print run from 30,000 to 45,000 was really a vote of confidence on Scholastic’s part. Compare that to Go!Comi’s initial print runs of about 10,000 each for their first books (I think Crossroad was a little higher). They went back to press, but I doubt they did 45,000 per volume.
OEL is interesting or ingenious? I can see a kid going going to Barnes & Noble looking for Peace Fuzz and seeing high school boys and girls loitering in the aisle reading manga like crazy (like I see all the time). Perfect gateway manga into the world of otaku (haha, let’s face it… anything to get kiddies to read these days!).
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