Tilting at Windmills #114
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2014 Manga Led predominately by “Attack on Titan”, the American market for Manga finally starts to rebound in 2014. Despite having the fewest number of placing books within the Top 750, both Unit and Dollar sales are up by healthy amounts. That’s a good trend. Here’s a year-to-year comparison chart for the Top 750:
After seven straight years of decline, Manga finally has an up year again! Finally! As noted, the manga series of the year is absolutely “Attack on Titan”, which places all fourteen released volumes, as well as all the releases from its three spin-off series, and a guidebook, within the Top 750. These twenty-one books represent 394k copies (23% of manga in the Top 750), and almost $4.7m in retail sales (21% of the manga in the Top 750) In 2013, the first volume of “Attack on Titan” sold just 29k copies; in 2014 it nearly doubles that to 58k. It’s a genuine hit at this point. The numbers for Manga as a category down into the “Long Tail” paint the picture
I count 76 distinct series among the 271 placing manga titles in the Top 750 – manga tends to be dominated by a smallish handful of properties. Here is the Top 20 manga:
This helps illustrate just how dominate “Attack on Titan” is for Manga right now in America – thirteen of the Top Twenty manga are “AoT” volumes! The former leader of the category, “Naruto”, continues to drop this year – “Just” 26k copies of its best-selling volume sell. This was more like 29k the year before. But, more revealingly, the total for all Naruto volumes in the Top 750 is about 162k copies combined. Compare this to six years ago in 2008 when the top selling volume of “Naruto” (v28 at that time) sold 104k copies all by itself! Breaking down the manga portion of the chart by publisher, Viz takes 125 of the 271 manga spots in the Top 750, keeping them as the overwhelmingly dominant manga player with just under half of the placing titles. Within the Top 750, Viz charted about 725k pieces, for about $8.7 million – Viz continues to control the manga charts as they have for a very long time now.
In the long tail, Viz finally stops the bleeding red ink in 2014, posting an infinitesimal gain in units, but a solid growth in dollars. Viz has three books (all volumes of “Naruto”) that do over 20k in sales in 2014, and another nine books that do over 10k. In second place among manga publishers, we have Kodansha Comics, which zooms forward this year and places 58 titles within the top 750, with 574k in sales, and $7.2 million dollars. This nearly doubles their performance from last year. Kodansha’s licenses formerly were both the original backbone of Tokyopop, as well as being the majority of Del Rey Manga. Kodansha pulled Tpop’s license in March of ’09 and Del Rey in October of ’10. You may want to look at those publisher’s listings below to get a better historical overview. These Long Tail figures are just for Kodansha-published titles, and they reflect that Kodansha, itself, first started publishing in 2010:
In 2014 Kodansha has one title over 50k (“Attack On Titan” v1), six more over 20k, and eleven more over 10k. The #3 manga publisher is now Yen Press, which places 70 titles in the Top 750, with about 360k copies sold, and nearly $5.3 million retail gross. Yen is a division of Hachette (more on them later). Here’s the Long Tail for Yen, as they go into the red on pieces, but still manage almost a 3% growth in dollars.
Yen has no books over 20k, and six over 10k. Their best-selling title is v1 of “Black Butler” at almost 17k sold. The fourth largest publisher of manga in 2014, on the Top 750 of BookScan is Seven Seas, which drops down to 13 titles, for 67k and $886k in sales. Seven Seas’ Long Tail looks like this, actively swimming against the trend for the larger market for manga – they’re clearly doing something right in a very tough space.
Their best-selling title is “Monster Musume” v2, which sells 9759 copies. Staying in the fifth largest publisher of manga, as measured by the BookScan Top 750 is Vertical. They place just three books into the Top 750, 11k copies, for $302k The Long Tail:
They, too, are having a solid year of growth. Their best-selling title is “Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin” v1 with 4453 copies sold. Eastern Publisher #6 will be Dark Horse, with just 2 placing titles in the Top 750, for just 10,482 copies sold and $210k in dollar sales. The better-selling of the two (“Unofficial Hatsune Mix”) scores 7033 copies sold. Looking at the Long Tail, this is what Dark Horse’s (manga only!) recent performance looks like – it isn’t looking great:
There’s more about Dark Horse down below in the “Western” section. Now we have to get into some technical notes. Once again Tokyopop manages to make the Top 750, despite being out of business since 2011: “Warriors Manga v4: The Rise of Scourge” shows up in the charts with Tpop’s name on it with 4251 copies sold in 2014. The thing is, I don’t believe these are actually “Tokyopop” copies, because this makes nearly 20k copies sold since Tpop went out of business, and that doesn’t seem like a rational amount of inventory to still have on hand. Further, Harpercollins appears to now be the publisher for the rest of the “Warriors” titles – and they have a second placement on the Top 750 with 3515 copies of a boxed set of other “Warriors” titles. Ultimately I think there is an error that no one at BookScan or Harper cares about in the Big Database In The Sky. I’m not the only one, look at the Amazon listing here – the picture still says “Tokyopop”, but the publisher field says “HarperCollins”, with a publication date that has to be Tpop’s… There’s another small problem: I kind of don’t think that the “Warriors” comics are “really” manga. This is subjective, and, of course, several of the “Warriors” comics have the word “manga” in the title, but damn it, it’s time for a little ideological purity here after all of these years, and I’m just going to call those “western” comics from this year forward, and you’ll find their numbers in Harpercollins’ list from here on out. I’ve been building a long tail for Tokyopop for a very long time, and I’m not at all excited about throwing out data. But, there is a time to face facts and admit you’ve been keeping track of something out of sheer schadenfreude. So, for the final time ever, here is the Long Tail for Tokyopop which once symbolized the “manga revolution” in America. This data will no longer be presented after this year.
Finally, we should probably talk a little about Del Rey’s manga line, which used to publish what is now published by Kodansha. Del Rey has zero manga books in the Top 750, because Del Rey’s license stopped in October of 2010. However, there are still copies trickling through America’s bookstores – some 256 different Del Rey manga titles sold at least a single copy in 2014. In this case, I’m electing to keep this going for at least another year – if only because 256 titles is still eighteen more titles than the first year (2007) we have Long Tail data for Del Rey! This is just the manga that Del Rey published – their non-manga material (like “The Hobbit” and the Dean Koontz “Odd” books are listed with the Western comics under their parent company Penguin Random House.
This is also probably the last year you’ll see this data! Yüklə 1,16 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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