The Future Of Manga

Manga comes to America would make a riveting, if not slightly depressing story. A huge cultural phenomena in its own country Manga has ended up stumbling around the US grabbing at tourists and desperately shouting ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ and developing a noticeable twitch whenever someone mentions ‘comics’ or ‘children’s cartoons’.

Manga in the US is dropping hard, harder even than traditional American produced comics and graphic novels, suggesting that economic downturn is not wholly responsible. There were of course a few breakthrough successes in the amine world. Pokemon and Digimon became an integral part of many children’s Saturday morning ‘cartoon’ viewing experience.

Rather than opening the floodgates for anime it seems to have taken a misstep, with TV producers picking up American produced shows made ‘in the style of’ so they don’t have the pesky task of horrifically butchering the source material through dubbing and editing out guns, spikes from breastplates on armour etc.

Failing bookstores haven’t helped either, in the US, Borders made up a large chunk of the accessibility to manga for consumers. In the UK Oatkers performed the same function, providing manga and providing incentives for purchasing a whole series. Oatkers also suffered a similar fate and were bought out by book mammoth Waterstones. It was quite some time before Waterstones began to offer manga again, which, to be fair, it now does.

But that seems to be the only light in a succession of failing businesses; Go! Comi, CMX, Tokyopop are amongst but a few.

Of course, when we say that manga has had a tough time on US shores, that’s not to say that it’s downfall is simply at the hands of ignorance or cultural snobbishness. The sale of manga in Japan has steadily been tumbling down the money hole since the mid-ninties. Graphic novel sales haven’t been too far behind.

But really when we look at the drop of manga sale, are we missing the big picture?

In the UK a review of book sales by Nielsen BookScan showed that the decline in sales of book prints was still on the decline by 1.3% in value and 1.9% in volume of sales. The adult fiction market was hit particularly hard, down by volume of sale by 7.8%.

Indeed in value adult book sales dropped to 321.3 million pounds. In 2009 it was worth 476.19 million in print sales. If you remove paperback sales from the equation the numbers are even worse. Hardback sales fell by 11.6%, shockingly only three titles sold more than 100,000 copies each.

Of course, what we’re all thinking is; eBooks. The editor-in-chief of the Bookseller noted that eBook sales had grown by 15% across the main book publishers. The value of the eBook market this year is shaping up to be 350 million pounds.

So, can we not despair about manga after all? Can’t it simply do what books are doing, moving to the digital media format?

Well, not easily. If your look at Dark Horse’s app for the iPad for example, you can purchase your comics in great looking digital quality to your mobile device. If you look at the physical copies you’ve probably noticed that the quality of the production value has increased. You only need to watch the Big Bang Theory to get an idea of the value of a first edition comic book. That kind of money isn’t for kids; that’s proper collectability and value.

However manga remains somewhat cheaper entertainment, producing monthly magazines with numerous series into a cheaply produced product, bent on making as much profit margin as possible. Plus if I want to read a Batman comic, I don’t expect to pick it up and find another dozen comics stuffed in with it. You can see here where the ideologies are beginning to split.

I mean, when was the last time you brought a magazine? Even more importantly, when was the last time you brought a magazine religiously, every month?

For example, I was browsing through the magazine rack the other day. A few publications on fantasy designs caught my eye. It was fairly glossy, the graphics were ok. My immediate first thought was, hm, I might get that on my iPad.

Why? Well because magazines look great on the iPad, they’re cheaper and I don’t have loads of page curling, slowly disintegrating magazines cluttering up my office.

And it’s cheaper.

I also prefer reading manga online. Sure I go out and buy manga when I see it in the store but a lot of the time the series I want isn’t there. So I read it online. To be honest I prefer it online, the picture is bigger and clearer and I don’t have to keep bending the cover back to see any text hiding too close to the bleed.

But what happens if you google manga online? You guys know, it brings up all the ‘scanlation’ sites. That’s nil points for manga publishers. If you try the same for comics you’re probably going to get physical stores and the publishers.

But if these scans weren’t online, you wouldn’t know about the manga right? I mean, I started reading D.Grey Man on MangaFox, I absolutely loved it, so when it became available over in the UK I bought it. If not for the illegal scans, they would have made zero money from me, because I would have never picked it up in a store.

Now whether or not you want to go for that argument, it certainly runs a little thin when you think about that fact the Japan has the same problem. But you’re helping the artists right? Well maybe, but the artists defiantly don’t feel that way.

Rei Hiroe, creator of Black Lagoon, famously posted to Twitter back in 2010 that he hoped the illegal uploader of Black Lagoon contracted pancreatic cancer. Kouta Hirano, author of the awesome Hellsing, added his thoughts, adding comprehensively that he hoped that the uploader would contract a hitherto undiagnosed disease, forcing medical journals to name the disease after said uploader, condemning him to the annals of history only to be associated with some embarrassing diseases.

However, whilst it’s all well and good for manga artists to wish crippling diseases on uploaders (tip: never anger an artist), what are they going to do about it?

Digital marketing gurus will tell you that if, for example, you have a bad review online, which is topping the google search results, the best way to get it down is to populate google with your own site results. Thus, when your company is googled, only your well polished sales sites, blogs and positive reviews will come up – pushing your bad review into the oblivion that is the second page of google results.

Basically – manga publishers need to get some digital content of their own. Now.

The price of not engaging with the new digital market? Well take a look at music industry guys.

Record sales don’t guarantee you success any more. As this article points out ‘superstar’ Pitball has 170 million YouTube plays but has sold less than 10 million albums across his long, never ending, continuously popping up on every radio song ever, career.

Now skipping over the questionable identifier of ‘superstar’ for Pitball I’m sure all of you know that the music industry has been brought low by the CD bubbles, Napster and iTunes taking a whopping 30% piece of the whole shebang. Even now the argument rages on about whether Spotify is good for artists.

The magna community has presented no united front in regards to a regulated digital marketing strategy to launch their titles. The only company making waves in this space is FUNinmation and its mad frenzy of cease and desist notices that it’s showered down on the anime community. Debate whether that has worked in the comments.

Even where the manga industry has made inroads to the online world, they seemed to have done it in a fractured, incoherent zig zag. For example, why would I buy a print edition of Fullmetal Alchemist when I can go to Square Enix online and get it cheaper?

And even if I can get it online, the few legit sites are outnumbered by scanlation sites at about a thousand to one (ish…)

So what’s going/needs to happen?

Well let’s look at the gaming industry. It used to be that you went out, picked up a game, paid your money and went home. Now you’ve got monthly subscriptions, in game purchases and inexpensive impulse buy apps.

Similarly, in the music industry with iTunes you can simply buy the one song off the album that you actually want. Or you can get Spotify and pay a monthly subscription for unlimited access to all the songs you could want (unless you want Taylor Swift – but that’s a whole different set of issues).

So is that the better business model? Instead of cramming as many mangas into a single magazine simply sell them off individually for less money? Or simply have a great, cohesive databases like Spotify, where you pay a monthly subscription.

Sure many artists say that Spotify means less money for the recording artists, but the manga publishers need to come up with a digital solution before the decision is taken for them. Whatever they do, they need to present a united, industry whole front to make it work.

I’ll leave you with one final example;

Some of you may be old enough to remember Kodak, famous for the phrase ‘Kodak’ moments. For those who don’t know, Kodak is a camera company, they sold cameras and developed film. In 1976 they held a ridiculous 90% market share of the photo films sales in the US.

In 2012 Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection due to the decline in photo film sales and its failure to transition adequately to the new digital market.

Why is this interesting you ask? The obvious problem was that they didn’t catch onto the digital market quick enough and were left behind. Well the interesting thing is that Kodak actually invented the core technology that is used in digital cameras today. However Kodak were so afraid so putting a dent into the sale of their photo products, they never pushed the new technology.

The point in relation to manga is this; Kodak relentlessly and bullishly refused to let go of their outdated method of working because it was currently making a profit. A couple years later they were bankrupt.

The manga industry needs to change its way of thinking. Not just because sales aren’t as good and they need to be picked up, but because soon someone else is going to come and take it all from them.

Conclusion? Manga needs a digital strategy, it needs to be cohesive and it needs the rough censuses of all publishers to make it work.

And they need it bad.

What do you think the future holds for manga? Do you think monthly subscriptions or one time cheap purchases are the way forward? Or do you think the rise of the self-publishers will be a game changer?