Random House has the website for its new UK imprint, Tanoshimi, up, with the full site and their inaugural line set to debut on August 3. All ye who have been complaining about the Tokyopop relaunch, come here and rest your eyes.
The Tanoshimi folks have done something interesting: They have thought about the different types of people who read their books, and they created five characters to match those types. (Note the Basilisk fan is over 19.) My only question is how these guys got the books when they won’t be published in the UK for another week; surely they didn’t order them on Amazon? Anyway, it’s a good way to define your market and attract different types of fans. The site has a name-that-character contest and dangles an iPod Nano as a prize, which is a nice touch and will certainly build the ol’ e-mail list.
Being in the UK himself, David Taylor is way ahead of me on this one. So far ahead that he did an interview with reps from Random House, Tanoshimi’s parent company, last March. And it’s a total coincidence that Tanoshimi’s tagline is “Love Manga.”
As the British sister to Del Rey, Tanoshimi has a debut line that many publishers would envy, including xxxHolic, Negima, Basilisk, and Air Gear.
That Tanoshimi website looks interesting…
Yes, I have high hopes for Tanoshimi here in the UK, and all the details so far point to it being great too.
The website is pretty cool, but really its nothing more then just a glorified holding page, but a good looking one at that. I’m hoping that they’ve read David’s recent posts on manga websites before they go line on 3rd August. ^.^