Viz Media massively upgrading to the digital era, Seven Seas becoming one of the most beloved publishers, and newcomers and comebacks in the physical/digital manga scene.
*DISCLAIMER* I am just a fan doing general observations about the manga industry and chiming in with my thoughts; I have no insight into the inner workings of manga licensing.
I would like to focus on the manga portion of The Beat’s thorough analysis of BookScan 2017. NPD BookScan tracks between 80% and 85% of print sales according to Publisher’s Weekly. FYI Brian Hibbs did an amazing job on this report and went crazy into the numbers portion in a way that more casual readers could understand. He kept mentioning “long tail,” which is “used to refer to the large number of products that sell in small quantities, as contrasted with the small number of best-selling products.” Apparently, manga has a long tail? I only skimmed the article since it’s about 15K+ words (90 min read) and focused my attention on the manga portion. If you want to check out last month’s BookScan chart, see Feb 2018 Top 20 Manga Chart.
With over 10,248 items listed, 5.9 million sold for a total of $85.6M, manga seems to be selling well! However, compared to 2008 when 7842 items listed, 10.2 million sold for a total of $100.8M during the manga boom, it pales in comparison. Remember that Borders closed in 2011, which led to many US manga companies to shut down.
Let’s see the top 6 manga publishers of 2017 and analyze the numbers after the break!