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Buying in bulk

February 29, 2008 by

It’s not really a follow-up to the last post, but I ended up doing some comparison shopping this evening. We were up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh at a spot where there’s a Borders basically across the street from a Barnes & Noble. The Borders has had a larger manga section for a while now, and a better selection in general, but I ended up doing all of my shopping across the street. Either B&N had gotten recent releases earlier or had shelved them faster. It was probably the latter.

(The whole area was unusually quiet, which makes me want to always go up on a Friday afternoon instead of the usual Saturday trips. Of course, the weather was awful, so that might have kept people away. There were next to no squatters in evidence, except for one twenty-something in the café at Borders reading a big stack of Shonen Jump titles.)

I also noticed that whoever is picking the licenses for Viz’s Shojo Beat line is doing a really good job. Given my tastes, there are usually a fair number of titles I like, but their current roster of books include a lot of titles I think are just plain good by any comics standard. So… um… good work.

Oh, and lots of people are weighing in on where they shop over at Comics Should Be Good, so go take a look.

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Proceed to checkout

February 27, 2008 by

And now, for no real reason other than I felt like writing about it and the subject kind of came up in the comments following Danielle Leigh’s latest Manga Before Flowers column, a brief look at what I buy where:

At the local comic shop: My most regular purchases at the local comic shop are books that I suspect won’t show up in a chain bookstore (manga that’s rated for mature audiences or books from smaller publishes that don’t seem to have quite achieved bookstore saturation). Most of my comic shop purchases are the result of pre-orders, just because the local shop is primarily focused on super-hero comics so I generally can’t wander in and find something to my taste. They’re very accommodating in terms of pre-orders and re-orders, which compensates for limited use as a place to browse.

At the bookstore: My purchases at Borders, Barnes & Noble, and so on are fairly random. I tend to either buy really mainstream shônen or shôjo titles, because I know they’ll be readily available and I can use my discount card. Sometimes I’ll special-order a particular book from the local Barnes & Noble if I really like it and want to trick them into ordering additional shelf copies. I’ll also buy other books from publishers like Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, and so on, usually based on word of mouth (or blog).

Online: I almost always use Amazon, as I like the discount and the free shipping. Amazon is kind of the “everything else” dumping ground… books I wasn’t sufficiently certain I’d enjoy but was later persuaded to look into via word of mouth (or blog), manga over the $10 point (but never under, because why pay full price when I can get it for 10% off at a brick-and-mortar shop?), stuff that I’d categorize as expensive (like One Thousand Years of Manga) and “when all else fails” books that I can’t find at a comic shop or a chain bookstore. (Yay! Amazon carries Shirtlifter!) Online shopping is convenient and often cheaper, but it still ends up being my court of last resort more often than not.

Filed under: Bookstores, Comic shops, On-line shopping 27 Comments

Saturation

January 3, 2008 by

With all of the year-end round-ups and lists of favorite comics, a common corollary seems to be “(Insert title here) probably would have been on my list if I could have found a copy of it anywhere.” That got me to thinking about which of the smaller publishers – the ones that aren’t an arm of a big book house or that have a distribution deal with one – are faring best in terms of bookstore distribution.

In my purely anecdotal experience, I think I’d have to put Drawn & Quarterly at the top of the list, with Fantagraphics an extremely close second, if not actually tied. I’d probably put Top Shelf in third place. The thing that strikes me most about Drawn & Quarterly, and maybe it does so with buyers too, is that their books are almost always really sturdy, attractive objects, so maybe that’s part of the equation… that they look like books, in other words.

These kinds of publishers generally do better at Barnes & Noble stores than Borders, and since B&N has the closest big chain store, that’s kind of my biggest criteria. It’s actually kind of odd to me, but in my experience, Borders is much less interested in anything that isn’t super-heroes or manga. Maybe it’s just a regional thing and that there are better selections in other places?

As far as smaller manga publishers go, the winner is almost certainly Go! Comi, though I always spot a fair amount of product from Seven Seas and Netcomics as well. I’m kind of puzzled by Dark Horse. Their non-manga books usually have pretty good representation in graphic novel sections, but not so much with the licensed material. In general, it seems like it’s easier to find their manhwa in a bookstore than their manga.

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Read the label

December 7, 2007 by

Tom Spurgeon points to a manga flap in Lexington, KY, involving a copy of Yuu Watase’s Absolute Boyfriend (from Viz’s Shojo Beat imprint and serialized in the magazine) in the children’s section of a Books-A-Million. I don’t really have anything much to say about the story itself, which reads like one of those “Can too much applesauce be fatal?” stories that local news outfits love so much. But Tom did make a couple of points about the Books-A-Million chain, and I wanted to chime in:

“The one thing that jumps out at me is that Book-a-Million is a big growth account for manga recently, and it’s my understanding that the chain has shown up in some towns that haven’t had a bookstore in a while. That would mean the store has increased coverage for manga in addition to simply increasing the number of outlets where it’s available.”

That was certainly the case here in north-central West Virginia. Books-a-Million was the first stand-alone chain bookstore in town, and it’s had a reasonably sized (and growing) manga section since it opened a few years back. It’s since been joined by a Barnes & Noble, which has its own substantial graphic novel/manga section.

I vaguely remember reports of Books-a-Million having a special “adult graphic novel/manga” section separate from the general population for some of the spicier, plastic-wrapped offerings, though I’ve never seen that set-up personally. And I’ve never seen manga or graphic novels shelved in the children’s section, though admittedly I don’t spend a lot of time there.

I can say without qualification that I think Absolute Boyfriend is probably the worse thing Watase has ever created, but that’s neither here nor there. It’s rated for older teens, as is a fair amount of the Shojo Beat line (or just for teens), so it sounds like it might have been carelessly shelved, if in fact it was in the children’s section.

Filed under: Bookstores, Decency flaps, Linkblogging, Viz 14 Comments

Parallel universe

October 24, 2007 by

I like to follow the ongoing discussions about the evolution of bookstores and comic shops (or Big Boxes versus specialists, if you like), so I thought this article in The New York Times was fascinating. It looks at the existing state of Germany’s book market – where small shops and big chains coexist peacefully and seem to thrive in each other’s company:

“Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal. All books must cost the same whether they’re sold over the Internet or at Steinmetz, a shop in Offenbach that opened its doors in Goethe’s day, or at a Hugendubel or a Thalia, the two big chains.

“What results has helped small, quality publishers like Berenberg. But it has also — American consumers should take note — caused book prices to drop. Last year, on average, book prices fell 0.5 percent.”

Alas, that delicate, consumer-friendly balance might be threatened by recent developments in neighboring Switzerland:

“Just across the border, the Swiss lately decided to permit the discounting of German books — a move that some in the book trade here fear will eventually force Germany itself to follow suit, transforming a diverse and book-rich culture into an echo of big-chain America.”

While I enjoy bargain-hunting as much as anyone, I do find the description of Germany’s book market kind of utopian. I’m still bitter about the closing of a mystery book shop in Dupont Circle, and few things make me depressed in quite the same way as those intermittent articles about independently owned, sometimes specialty book shops shuttering because they can’t compete with the seven or eight Barnes and Noble and Borders stores that have opened up.

Of course, I’m a total hypocrite, ignoring these socialist leanings whenever a coupon shows up in the mail. And general principle couldn’t keep me from laughing and laughing at Meg Ryan’s misfortunes in You’ve Got Mail, but I don’t think that had anything to do with her character’s profession.

Still, the article is well worth a read for a glimpse at another market approach to book sales, the competing interests of culture and economics, and lots of other related issues.

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Scanning

September 28, 2007 by

ICv2 looks at recent BookScan numbers, and they find a whole lot of manga with a hefty dose of ninja in the mix:

1. Naruto 16
2. Naruto 17
3. Naruto 18
4. Fruits Basket Fan Book
5. Fruits Basket 17
6. Naruto Anime Profiles
7. Negima 15
8. Naruto 1
9. Naruto 15
10. Bleach 20
11. Death Note 1

The imminent arrival of the Death Note anime on Adult Swim is obviously giving that series some new legs, and Viz must be happy with the placement of the first volume of Naruto. It looks like the massive roll-out strategy is working quite nicely, particularly if you can draw a direct line from the multiple new releases to the renewed interest in the beginning of the series. (I’m not entirely sure you can, but it’s at least a dotted line.)

Filed under: Bookstores, Sales 4 Comments

What sells, and where?

August 30, 2007 by

It’s a couple of days old, but I found this comment at Journalista to be really interesting. It’s a very well-informed compare-and-contrast between what sells in comic shops and what sells in bookstores:

“I have a comic book shop, my girlfriend owns a bookstore. Here’s a quick list of what we’ve found:

“Naruto sells well everywhere.”

Okay, there’s a lot more, but given the big news of the day, I couldn’t resist. Anyway, go read, especially if you’re geek-ishly interested in the different audiences between the two kinds of retail outlets.

(Also, it’s kind of gruesomely fun to imagine creators rolling out comic-shop friendlier versions of work like Fun Home. I’m easily amused.)

Filed under: Bookstores, Comic shops, Linkblogging 1 Comment

Flower power

August 17, 2007 by

As I said in Chris Mautner’s reviewer round-up, I don’t think posting images with reviews is essential, but I do appreciate it when someone does it as well as Shaenon K. Garrity. I appreciate it even more when she puts her skills in service of a book I absolutely love, in this case, Fumi Yoshinaga’s Flower of Life.

I’m kind of disappointed that I rarely see this title on bookstore shelves. There’s almost always at least one copy of at least two volumes of Yoshinaga’s Antique Bakery (as it should be), but that’s rarely the case with Flower. (There is one awesome Borders in downtown DC that was like a Yoshinaga lover’s dream. They had everything.)

Using John Jakala’s method of surveying, I notice that not a single copy of a single volume of the series is available in any of the Pittsburgh Barnes & Noble outlets. Things look better at the Pittsburgh Borders outlets. All five have copies of the first volume; four have the second in stock; only one has copies of the third.

Filed under: Bookstores, DMP, Linkblogging 2 Comments

Geezers

July 6, 2007 by

One of the extensions of the recent discussions about the commercial viability of manga for adult men – seinen – is similar disappointment with the state of josei – comics for grown-up women. Blogless Simon Jones notes:

“Though, looking at it, I’ve noticed that, while selling better than Senin, Josei doesn’t sell particuarly well either. While it’s obvious that females are the dominant manga demographic, I suspect it tends more towards girls rather than women and so the far more…chick lit-ish Josei or the arty stuff or the just plain older stuff just doesn’t sell as well. And in many respects, that’s a terrible, terrible shame.”

I’d add that one of the mildly annoying trends of manga publishing is that the price often goes up with the age of the target audience.

Over at MangaBlog, ALC’s Erica says:

“ALC Publishing works very hard at keeping the schoolgirlyness of our yuri to a minimum in order to reach a more adult audience. It’s harder than you might think.”

So is audience age as much or more of a factor than its gender? It’s certainly possible. There’s always talk about giving the current majority of manga readers – kids – someplace to go next when their taste for shôjo and shônen gives way to a desire for something sturdier. And there’s certainly sturdier stuff available, if you know where to look which, in my experience, generally isn’t on the shelves of Borders or Barnes and Noble in the U.S.

I wonder how many of the 87 titles scheduled for Fall release are aimed at older audiences, excluding the yaoi niche (which gobbles up 32 of those 87 slots)? Yen Press has With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, and Fanfare/Ponent Mon offers Awabi. Aurora’s parent publisher has an extensive josei catalog, though their early announcements don’t necessarily reflect that. And one could always surmise that Viz’s Shojo Beat imprint is pushing things in a josei-ish direction with Nana and Honey and Clover. (Nana is technically shôjo, but Honey and Clover is full-on josei, right? At least in terms of its publishing history?)

Filed under: Bookstores, Linkblogging 6 Comments

Shelf space

June 16, 2007 by

We went up to Pittsburgh last night and stopped at one of the older Borders. They’ve made some changes to their layout, swapping the graphic novels and manga with the fiction and literature, if you can believe it. The comics sections seem to have expanded somewhat, but especially the graphic novels. The manga selection doesn’t seem to be any more diverse, though the selection of other graphic novels seems like it’s a lot more comprehensive.

The store’s layout is kind of weird. It’s on two floors, with a big opening down to the lower level. The graphic novels and manga used to be on the shelves running along the railing around the opening, the new home of Hamingway and Austen and their ilk. Now the comics on the main walls, and they’re some of the first things you see when you walk in. They also seem to have moved some of their other shelving units so that they could set up a seating area near the manga, which makes sense.

There were a few kids reading manga in some chairs near the shelves, but there were more thirty-something men looking at the graphic novels, which was a change of pace. Those DC Showcase editions seemed to be the big draw.

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