Kodansha USA III
If I were a spiteful, mean-spirited person with little forgiveness for the occasional foibles of others and no generosity at all in my soul, I might point out that even half-assed internet journalism consists of, at a minimum: finding links to original sources, writing full articles on your own blog (or emailing enough info to a blogger-of-record so they can post) (or posting a full article with links and attribution in one of the several well-trafficked-forums under your own damn name or an ‘official’ handle/alias), and following a story past the dropping-an-Oh-By-The-Way-rumor-in-the-comments-of-someone-else’s-blog stage.
It would seem that the instigator of this mess, “Chthulu“, has returned once and for all to the dormant state so natural to a Great Old One and will not speak again. Haven’t heard a peep from Chthulu since. …except for another drive-by anonymous comment to chastise me for chastising him… er… it.
— but a comment isn’t journalism; it’s… well… OK so a comment is not nothing as some comments are both insightful and corrective (Matt Thorn’s comments on my “Ages of Fan” posts spring immediately to mind) but I’m reminded more of a chimpanzee flinging poo than anything else in this particular case.
Sorry for the long digressive intro, folks: tweaking Chthulu into a pique is a little hobby of mine, and I’m trying to taunt the punter into leaving another rambling, illogical, nonsensical comment — something where she (he? it?) insults me once again without providing anything to back up either the original claims or any sort of authority from which she might be speaking. So far — past the one exceptional, glorious fact which can be corroborated — Chthulu is full of shit.
The One Fact is that Kodansha is coming.
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There have been some developments since the orignal bomb and my initial follow-up — let’s start with some changes at Kodansha Mothership in Japan: at The Kodansha there are two main points to note; first and most importantly, licensing is still a bit part of their business, not just here in the States but internationally. Even if the new initiative results in fewer NA licensees, it’s not like BigK is going to stop a business practice that, after all, results in money gained for absolutely no effort.
(That’s the main point, methinks. Nothing is wrong with licensing; it’s free money. If you sell a license, you get cash up front and your partner assumes all risk — The only reason to try Going It Alone is that there is even more money to be made if one invests the time and effort into producing the books or DVDs directly — but like any investment, returns are not guaranteed.)
With an established US market for manga, and seven solid years (or 16, or 20, or 25 — depending on how one cares to account for things like Mixx, Animerica, and Akira) of groundwork already laid, and with the library of titles available to Kodansha, this is an excellent time to enter the market.
You question that? “Oh, we’re in a depression” – “Oh, the bookstore market is shrinking” – “Oh, the Direct Market is entering meltdown, there’s no way a new publisher could enter now”
Kodansha isn’t a new publisher; They’re 100 years old. Just sayin’.
The second point worth more than a second glance is found on the current org chart for BigK — in addition to the two existing English-language affiliates (though did they ever do anything with the KodanClub brand?) there are two new companies: Kodansha USA, Inc. & Kodansha USA Publishing, LLC — and of course Random House Kodansha Co. Ltd. is still a going concern,
and as an aside: this loosely affiliated network of separate companies seems to be a typical asian model for corporate organization; consider Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Samsung as examples
I guess what I’m trying to say is that a Japanese publisher setting up a new company is comparable to a US publisher setting up a new imprint [mostly semantic] and it’s as natural a process as me ‘producing’ empty glass and aluminium containers for recycling — just a natural part of doing business.
—that is to say, the big news wasn’t that there’s a new division, but instead will be what books are they releasing?
Granted, there is the report that Kodansha USA was captalized with 2 Million Dollars, but that was coupled with the following: “Printing, market research and distribution will be outsourced to local companies while sales and marketing strategy will be handled by Kodansha.” Now, $2MM isn’t nothing, but the rest of that statement leaves me scratching my head as to what’s different: Someone else (a player to be named later, but I’m thinking some arm of Random House) will be printing and distributing the books.
& There is a lot of business double-speak in that statement; marketing is everything and nothing. Yes, without proper sales support a title does nothing, but all this talk of Marketing and Strategy leaves me cold. Kodansha USA will directly direct the ‘soft sciences’ of sales and marketing — but tell me, does translation and localization fall under the aegis of Marketing or of printing & distribution?
Who exactly is producing the new books? Translation of manga isn’t something you can run through Google, it is all art and no science. Sure, you want to sell me a book, but it had better be a Good Book or we’re all wasting our time. You know, the more I look into this Kodansha debacle the more I feel that it may end up as a big mistake; to date, there is nothing reported about the procedure of bringing Kodansha manga direct to the American audience, just some Pie in the Sky spitballing about New Company This and Two Million That.
(Madoff is the clearest recent example that one can easily ‘sell’ nothing. What, exactly, are you trying to sell us, Kodansha?)
Where are the damn books? Where is an announcement of any forthcoming books? Throw me a bone; I love quite a number of Kodansha titles and hell, I want this to work, but the deafening silence points to K-USA being much more of a 2010 thing than anything that we’ll see this year — and even a 2010 release is a mere figment of my imagination, my best guess, as nothing has been announced.
And given the highly improbable Sep. ’08 dates that were first reported — which I questioned not once but twice — I enjoy the vindication of my initial pessimism but still, I’d rather be reading the comics.
I guess what I want to know, after all this time, is just what Kodansha USA is going to do to my beloved US manga market? Have there been any additional reports past internet rumor?
