5by8 #28: Conditions on the Ground, and Your Weekend Homework Assignment
Manga isn’t growing by leaps and bounds anymore; it never was a license to print money and now the initial boom (which I’ve dated to 2004-2007, though others say it started earlier) is settling into something more like steady single-digit growth.
Steady single-digit growth isn’t just good, it’s excellent. We all need to get our heads to a place where we can agree on that, instead of obsessing over what the fan world used to look like and lamenting the crash of the anime DVD market. It’s a shame, that, but manga isn’t anime and with Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan all partnered-up (or getting into the game themselves) the books will be available for quite some time.
quick review for those who haven’t been reading my stuff for the past year:
Between the 5 of them, these companies account for about half of the US book business. [48.8% – Source: Michael Hyatt, Dec 2006] Each of the 5 also acts as their own distributor, shipping new titles direct to book stores. Since not everyone is going to know this off the top of their head
- Random House = Del Rey
- HarperCollins partnered with Tokyopop
- Simon & Schuster partnered with Viz Media
- Hachette = Yen Press
- Macmillan partnered with Seven Seas
The only major player not in the game is Penguin. see also: 5by8 #25, Squeeze Play, on publishers and licensing, and 5by8 #26, What’s the Target? on publishing and sales.
We can discuss which third tier (or major) manga publisher is going to go under or is struggling or might not meet their deadlines (or has never met their deadlines) but at $10 a pop and with this much publishing muscle behind it, manga as a category isn’t going anywhere.
Steady single-digit, year-on-year growth is a Great place to be.
Got it?
Good.
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Making the books is only half of the equation, though: Retail is suffering a bit.
Let’s start with conditions on the ground:
I had occasion over the weekend to visit not one but two of the bookstores closest to my home — neither of which is actually the bookstore I work at, handily enough, and also handily: of the two, one is a Barnes & Noble while the other is a Borders.
Survey Says…
At Barnes and Noble I encountered three bookcases full of manga, each 6+ feet tall and containing 7 shelves. You’re thinking, “Only three bookcases, eh?”
Here’s a tip for all you would-be-experts who are looking to compare bookstores: the key figure is linear feet. At this location, each shelf is 4’ long, so the 21 shelves gives us 84 linear feet of shelving. (plus other displays, see below)
Borders is better, and looks a lot better at first blush: 12 bookcases, 4’ tall, 5 shelves each (except for the first one, which only had 4 to accommodate taller hardcovers and art books on the top shelf). Each shelf was only 3’ long, though, so Border’s 59 shelves ended up being only 177 linear feet. —4 times as many bookcases (and 4 times the footprint — that is to say, the square footage of carpet occupied by the section) but only twice the linear feet.
While my local Borders has double the shelving compared to it’s closest competitor, the local B&N, there are two other merchandising points to consider: at B&N, every shelf was packed— if you pulled out a volume it was iffy that you’d be able to reshelve it. Borders, at least my local Borders this particular weekend, wasn’t just loose, it looked a little weak: bare wood showing in spots and one or two titles shelved face-out (instead of spine-out) on each shelf.
This particular B&N also had two spinner racks for new releases (one each, Viz and Tokyopop: room for 40 feature titles on each), along with half of a display table (the rest was non-manga GNs) and an endcap. As a bookseller, I can tell you the titles that overflowed onto the table and endcap weren’t there because someone thoughtfully selected titles for recommended reading — they ran out of room, and shunted the new stuff (and stuff they had in quantity, and omnibus editions that were just taking up too much space) onto displays because there wasn’t room anywhere else. Borders… doesn’t have to do this. There aren’t any ancillary manga displays at Borders — at least at my Borders — but they’ve twice the dedicated shelf space and it isn’t quite full at the moment.
Don’t get me wrong, Borders is still stocking more manga. Complete or near complete runs of things like Hana-kimi, Red River, Prince of Tennis… hell, for Red River or Prince of Tennis you’d be lucky to find the first volume at B&N, more likely you’d see just the most recent volume and that’s about it.
Speaking of Tokyopop, (we weren’t, but I can’t think of a clever segue) I also saw a near-complete run of Chibi Vampire (all the manga volumes, though not all 5 novels) and Fruits Basket at Borders, and a healthy sampling of other series (DNAngel, Rave Master, Kingdom Hearts — and the OEL series Warcraft and Warriors) and most representatives from the popular back list (Live Hina, Chobits) — I don’t carry a title list in my pocket (hm. maybe I should…) and I won’t claim encylopedic knowledge but there were enough Tokypop titles in evidence that I can’t corroborate previous reports of Tokyopop being ‘stripped’ from shelves.
At least here in Atlanta, I’d call both of these locations average, if not representative. I’d have to plan an excursion (several, in fact) much farther afield to be sure, and I’m not going to spend that much in gas —this week. Maybe next year.
—A quick, non-scientific sampling of my shelves at home shows that each linear foot holds 17-18 volumes of manga. Calling it 17 and rounding down to the nearest hundred: my local B&N is stocking 1400 volumes, plus whatever is on the spinner racks et al. — so 1500 volumes plus — while my local Borders has room for 3000, and even at only 75-80% full (which is where they’re at right now, I reckon’) they’re still stocking 2200-2400 books. Someone else can tell me how that translates into titles stocked — I didn’t bother to count how many different series were on the shelves, or multiple copies of the same book; I was strictly looking at fixtures
— if pressed I’d say about 200 series at either store (Borders has more complete runs)
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When considering retail space for books, there are 4 things to consider:
1. Linear Feet of Shelving
2. Location Location Location
3. Footprint
4. Category Adjacencies
Actual shelf-feet is most important, as this translates directly into the number of books shelved. The location (where is the manga: up front, near the coffee shop, near the newsstand, or in back on the 2nd floor?), footprint (how much of the square footage of the store is used) and category adjacencies (is your manga next to sci-fi or kids?) also matter, but it all differs wildly from store to store — and to a limited extent all that doesn’t matter: fans will find manga wherever you put it.
But honestly? Give manga a dedicated space near the magazine rack, toward the front entrance or coffee shop if you can swing it, and don’t hide it either in genre fiction or next to the kids dept. (oh sure, the kids are buying it, but they don’t associate Kingdom Hearts with Judy Blume, the Boxcar Children, or—godforbid—other Disney books.)
Forget for a minute that manga look like books. These are periodicals —in the original meaning of the term: items printed periodically; volumes in a series and coming out multiple times a year. Your customer base comes in at least once a month, and while they’ll find manga in that furthest back corner if that’s where you insist on placing it, you’re only getting the trufans if you market it that way. Really, what you need are the 6-19 year olds who don’t know they want manga yet — but will buy it if they happen to walk by it (“oooo… Naruto! And Bleach! And Vampire Knight, I don’t know what that is but it sounds so cool! and this looks cute but, um, …what’s a Shugo Chara?”).
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Here’s your homework:
- Field Trip! Go to your local. (no need to make a special trip, I know you’ll be in sometime this week or next for your fix)
- Count the number of manga shelves
- Estimate the shelf size. If you can’t do this by eye, there are some handy rulers just to hand at most bookstores: the ‘standard’ manga size (Viz/Tokyopop/Del Rey) is 7½ inches high, a copy of Shonen Jump (or a DC/Marvel GN) is 10 inches high. Or use a 'cloth yard': for most folks, stretch out your arm and from the tip of your nose to your finger tips is going to be 3 to 3½ feet. (If you plan on using this method I hope you can think of a casual way to employ it; I don’t advise sticking your nose on the bookcase)
- (hint: I think for a lot of the chain bookstores, shelves are either 3 or 4 feet long)
- And then… math. (Sorry, but the math isn’t too bad): # of shelves x length of shelves = linear feet of shelving.
- linear feet x 17 manga volumes per foot = total number of manga.
I’m not doing it (enough on my plate as is) but it might be interesting if someone could take these instructions and see if internet volunteers might be willing to take the 15 minutes to survey their local and post a short update (zip code, Store name, # of bookcases, linear feet of shelving/# of manga volumes) just to see if there might be a way to track what the retail penetration of manga actually *is*. We can trade anecdotal stories all we like, which is fine, but if you wanted a pseudo-scientific metric, here’s your metric.
maybe set up a wiki. Wikis are ‘web 2.0’ and all that.
(And this would work for any genre/format—say, Graphic Novels, mayhaps—though the volumes/ln.ft. constant would be different.)
Until some other blog or individual takes on this project:
go ahead and post your own observation in the comments. If enough (i.e. more than three) people do it, maybe it can serve as both a starting point and inspiration for someone who does have the time to follow through.
[Editorial Note: I’m still working on moving archives over from comicsnob.com; if you’d like to read previous 5by8 columns a handful are available here, though all older columns (#1-#27) can be found at Comicsnob]
