There isn’t enough room for all of us

Missed it… ComicSnob’s 2007 US retail bookstore number crunching overload.

My brain doesn’t get along with numbers as well as it once did, and if you’re like me, just skip to the analysis at the end.  The major theme to take away from here is the lack of room for any further substantial growth for manga in traditional retail sectors.  Either online commerce is exploited in a big way, a new kind of graphic novel-only bookstore arises, or manga publishers will have to resort to cannabalizing each other for bookstore shelf space already stretched to its limits.  We already know who’d win if it came down to that.

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And related to the above, Deb Aoki provides coverage of BEA where manga pubs talk about exploring new sales channels while strengthening presence in existing but somewhat overlooked markets, such as the DM.  Meanwhile, Journalista picks up on the undercurrent of very small, but rapidly growing e-book sales seemingly experienced by most publishers in attendance at BEA.

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Canned Dogs has translated a rather informative blog post from Fanta-G dispelling myths surrounding doujinshi, or self-published coterie magazines in Japan, and Comiket, the largest convention devoted to doujinshi.

But a couple points of contention…

• Adult (ero, yaoi) doujinshi circles may only be 30% of Comiket, but adult doujinshi have a far more significant presence in the second hand doujinshi market.
• Doujinshi is a hobby first and foremost, and circles who are profitable remain in the minority.  But Comiket is not the end all, be all for doujinshi sales… with hundreds of other doujinshi conventions and the rising number of specialty stores that carry new doujinshi on consignment, popular creators can have doujinshi with print runs that approach those of professional publications.  Doujinshi is very much an industry unto itself, and those who have a regular, consistent offering of doujinshi every year (particularly small/individually-run circles who may be professionals already) can and do make money.

If you missed it, the Comiket Committee recently released a mountain of information on its history and circle participation.

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Homeless manga man does a live reading of ero manga.  Yes, this is as good as it sounds.

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Finally, MangaBlog has more on the off again, on again, then off again fortunes of DramaQueen.  This newest round of speculation began with this entry on the Boys Next Door blog, a reposting of a DQ forum message from translator Taisa Toluchanian that paints a not-so-rosy financial picture of the company.  In short, DQ may have run out of money, investors, and options… and this is all told through an honest account of Toluchanian’s own hardships as a direct result of DQ’s inability to pay salaries it promised to Toluchanian and others.

As quickly as yaoi rose in the bookstores and was ordained the hot new thing, misfortune has befallen several of its publishers.  Was the yaoi boom simply overblown?  I don’t think that’s quite the case.  But the surge in yaoi publishers may have lead to an arms race that snowballed into the problems we see right now with DQ.  One possible scenario is that with sudden competition, DQ may have been inclined to snatch up more licenses than they could handle, and set release schedules they couldn’t possibly keep.  The demand also surely drove up the expectations of Japanese licensors, along with the asking price.  Now mix this together with bookstore distribution, where returnability and long lead times between shipping and payment mean higher upfront costs for new publishers, and a well-planned, promising yaoi upstart can suddenly become severely underfunded as investors grow skittish at the unexpected rise in outlay.