Rocket Bomber - article - publishing - manga - I'll have my hat - with a side of crow - and some humble pie.

If the guy (girl?) spreading rumours a couple of weeks ago had used his/her real name, I could apologise to them.

I stand by what I said then — rumors without, you know, some sort of corroboration (like say, a link like this one) are worthless and more than a little irritating, at least to me — But it looks like ‘chthulu’ was right, or at least, has good sources.

Publisher Kodansha To Sell Manga Comic Books In U.S. On Its Own as reported by Nikkei just this afternoon (about an hour ago)

icv2.com sent out an email with the buzz, they’ve an article up already with the details that we know, pulling from the Nikkei article (at least the free, non-subscription part of it we can read) almost verbatim.

Let me pull from some comments I left on The Beat when the original rumor started circulating:

Kodansha Intl. is and has been an English language publisher for quite some time; notable recent releases include “A Geisha’s Journey: My Life as a Kyoto Apprentice” by Kodomo (a nome de plume) and “Izakaya: The Japanese Pub Cookbook” — along with a slate of Japanese Language titles (as in, learning the language), a number of drool-worthy coffee-table-grade art books, and the “Draw Your Own Manga” series of art how-to books (which may be the source of the error and rumor; though the first volume is 4 years old… nothing new here)

The deal between Kodansha and Del Rey/Random House is a strategic alliance, and also a two-way street if my hazy memory of old press releases can be taken at face value — I don’t know which RH titles have been translated into Japanese, but if they’re out there at all then Kodansha is publishing them.

Whatever the deal with Del Rey, Kodansha seems to have kept noted educational and cultural titles off the table, and reserved them for their own imprint. Gacha Gacha, though, is Del Rey’s for as long as they can stomach to publish it.

Kodansha Intl. titles are distributed in the US by Oxford University Press.

I don’t know if Oxford has the distribution muscle or the desire to move manga into chain bookstores; I’d say odds are good the new “Kodansha Manga USA” or whatever they want to call it will find some other distributor.

And I think the deal with Random House/Del Rey is still valid —
there’s a company in Japan called “Random House Kodansha” after all, and when the Del Rey imprint was repurposed for manga they touted the “large-scale cross-publishing relationship” between the two.

I don’t know if Del Rey is losing all their Kodansha titles, or is going to be frozen out of any new properties, or if they’ll just get leftovers from now on, or what. (So far, no one knows.)

Oh, and just because Kodansha says they’re getting books out in September, I don’t know that we’ll be seeing them at the local Big Box Bookstore — again, let me re-post something I wrote earlier

From the New York Times:

“Chain stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders generally buy books at least six months before the publication date and know about particular titles even farther in advance. Much to the anxiety of midlist writers clamoring for attention, chain stores determine how many copies of a title to buy based on the expected media attention and the author’s previous sales record.”

So if one had a new manga line (and as noted above, I give: you have your new manga line and it is all that, a bag of chips, and a side of fried chicken) and you were perhaps looking for placement in the major chain stores (I’d call that a given, but you can figure out your own business models) then I’m guessing, it wouldn’t be an “oh by the way” announcement at a trade fair, your would have potentially shopped the idea around at B&N and Borders (combined book sales of around $8 billion last year, and estimated sales of $98 Million in manga — assuming the % of manga sold through B&N/Borders is a constant fraction that directly relates to overall book sales)

So, just looking at the prospect from a publishing perspective:

Either Kodansha has been planning this in secret for at least 6 months and has convinced the B&N and Borders buyers to sign on to a brand new company, sight unseen with no sales record, just because it’s ‘manga’

Or they’re going to screw their current American partners, look for new manufacturers (unless they’ve been printing English manga on Japanese presses in anticipation of this announcement) and are willing to wait a half-a-year for the shakedown, whiplash, possible court case, and in the mean time lost sales….

Well Sure. Makes all kind of sense.

Now we have an announcement. And a date (September). But really — how are they going to make this work in just three months?