Japan Expo Paris award winners; On the different kinds of manga “consumers”…

Patriot… turned in to printer… Comic AG Digital… almost finished… back… hurting… need shower… 

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PWCW’s Kai-Ming Cha and Ed Chavez summarizes the AX show, where they tried their best to get someone to talk on the record about Kodansha, but to no avail.  Cha also blogs about the coming changes for the manga industry that she probably couldn’t include in the PWCW article.

Related: David Welsh makes a good point here about the unrealistic expectations for grown-up manga genres.  It did take 40 years for manga to become an institution in Japan…

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Somewhat related to the above, a few thoughts on the “gloomy” atmosphere surrounding manga at the moment…

This may sound cold-hearted, but all the recent focus on American manga publishers, and attempts to extrapolate their health to the manga medium overall, smacks of unjustified self-importance.  Sure, the US market has become financially important for Japanese publishers, but we’re still just a line item on their quarterly earnings report.  When have we, the US market, ever really driven crucial development of manga itself?  Speaking as a reader, if tomorrow every American manga company disappeared and all of the market were controlled by two Japanese publishers, I would be filled with melancholic nostalgia for those who were here before, but not fear.  Whether I get a manga from an American or Japanese company just wouldn’t make much of a material difference… and why should it?

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The Comics Reporter has a list of winners from the Japan Expo in Paris.  At least the French still give Go Nagai the proper amount of respect.  Also reporting on Japan Expo, the AFP thinks manga is weird.  Mainly because of the cosplayers, it seems.

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Rocket Bomber has a perceptive post on the different kinds of online manga shoppers, but you have to read a bunch of boring stuff on sales ranking methodology before you can get to it.  Yaoi shoppers get their own category?  So unfair.

This actually touches upon something I’ve had on my mind since the flurry of newspaper industry layoffs due to declining ad revenue.  The most simple break-down of manga readers to me are those who do (or potentially would) spend money, and those who don’t (and may never) spend money on our books.  Obviously, it can get a lot more complicated than that; this is just the most rudimentary starting point.  And as a dimunitive publisher with an equally minuscule budget, it behooves us to know who our customers are, and who are not, so our resources are not wasted.  On this, we recently ran two small ad campaigns that were quite illuminating.

We purchased a 1-month banner ad on the (in)famous 4chan community board, and a full page ad in Otaku USA, the print magazine.  Both campaigns cost the same, and were run one after the other.  4chan brought in a respectable number of hits to this website, at a cost of roughly 0.28 cents per click-thru (also good).  Yet we saw no appreciable increase in purchases made through our webstore during the month, despite 4chan being a major hub for purveyors of adult manga.  On the other hand, the ad in Otaku USA has increased our webstore sales by over 100% since the August issue hit stores, despite it being a “general” anime/manga magazine with no adult anime/manga coverage, and there having been no significant increase in web traffic.

I can’t say for sure why the 4chan ads didn’t bring in additional sales; perhaps it’s because of the amount of illicit material available on the board itself and the kind of audience that attracts, or the aversion to print in general of those tech-savvy users, or it could simply be that our ads were poorly designed.  I can’t even say for sure that the 4chan campaign was ineffective… if it raised awareness enough that people would recognize our books when they walk into a comic shop or browse online, then it did its job.  But what I can say for sure is that advertising in Otaku USA worked.  I saw a real, quantifiable effect (and like the above, there were probably lots of unquantifiable benefits too).

Again, it’s impossible for me to weigh the longterm effectiveness of either campaigns within such a short time span, but if I were pressed to name only one difference between the two campaigns that could account for the disparity, it would be the cost of participation for the two readerships.  Obviously, Otaku USA readers spend money on print.  For all the traffic it generates, we can’t make the same determination for the average 4chan goer.  At least in this instance, it turns out that finding a group of generic consumers with money, and a willingness to spend it, is better than targeting a bunch of dedicated online “fans” with unknown buying habits.  Yeah, seems counter-intuitive, doesn’t it…