In this week’s PW Comics Week, Kai-Ming Cha has a nice profile of Seven Seas, which has emerged in the past year as a publisher that gets it right on a number of levels, including a good website that really boosts the product and readable manga that will transfer easily into other media.
Also, Calvin Reid rounds up reactions to Tokyopop’s web exclusives. The first sentence minces no words:
Tokyopop’s plan to sell a selection of poorly selling and new manga series exclusively through its Web site was met with a wave of criticism and anger from many comics shops, adamant that the move is a misguided betrayal of the retail community.
No burying the lede here! Reid is upfront about the fact that these are manga that aren’t selling, and that the retailers are pissed anyway. Then he brings in Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley to answer the criticisms.
“It’s interesting that people are so fascinated in about 20 books out of the 500 we publish each year,” says Kiley. “It’s not like we’re talking about Fruits Basket or Kingdom Hearts.“
And, he adds, it’s all about the shelf space, which is, after all, finite. But to Chris Butcher, the online exclusives are a harbinger of things to come:
“Our fear is that we order Tokyopop books, and three or four volumes later, they decide it’s not profitable enough for them to ship them to us. Which books will they stop selling [to retailers] because they decide to sell online? It keeps us guessing.”
Kiley says Tokyopop could actually shift books from online exclusives back to stores if they sell well. But this has a whiff of bad science about it:
Asked why the books need to be sold exclusively and why consumers weren’t at least being offered a discount, Kiley says it is a “control” on the experiment. “If this is to be a real test, it has to be a special, controlled environment to get a real assessment, without having sales bleed out through other channels. We need to know if people will begin a series online. Discounts would skew the market.”
Uh, no. Almost everyone who buys manga online is already getting a discount, so not offering discounts only skews the market toward failure.
Yeah, you had the same reaction as I did to the “Discounts would skew the market” line. To me it seems as though the online and direct markets are completely different, and with many customers mutually exclusive.
Most of those titles that are exclusive have a shoujo bent to them. It’s largely due to girls buying manga at bookstores that manga has taken off. So now because there’s no room at the bookstores, these girls are going to go online with probably no credit card and a non-intuitive, more complex way of ordering titles they’ve never heard of (nine #1’s!!!)? Am I missing something?