Answerman

Why Are Some Manga Printed In Such Limited Quantities?

Melissa asks:

I've been a longtime fujoshi and now that I've got a stable job and can really expand my yaoi manga collection, I've noticed that many series are out of print, making it hard for me to track them down. I know a lot of yaoi manga imprints have disappeared over the years, but even popular series published by June / DMP can go out of print quickly. Is yaoi manga just printed at ridiculously low runs? Some of these June manga go for hundreds of dollars on the secondhand market, so wouldn't the company notice and do a republish or at least a crowdfunded one?

This is a problem with a lot of niche manga titles. It's not just yaoi, although yaoi is definitely prominent among them. Inventory control with books is very difficult, and with niche titles like many yaoi manga, the number of units sold is so low that reprinting them often just isn't worth the risk.

When a graphic novel goes off to the printer, the publisher has to put in an order for x number of books -- but there's usually a minimum. There's a great economy of scale when it comes to book printing: the more you print, the lower the price. Many printers will print as few as 250 copies at a time, although the price for doing so is so high that it's often just as cheap to print 500. Obviously a big title from Viz or Kodansha USA will be printed in orders of magnitude more than that. The cost per unit for a big title will be less than a dollar, but a small niche title can cost much more. The very act of printing it is financially risky.

Once printed, those books are then sent through all of the distribution channels that manga gets sold through: book store chains, Diamond Comics, Amazon, etc. But from there, the publisher has no idea what happens to those books. They could be sitting in warehouses, they could still be on store shelves. When sales are that low, reprinting is risky. The last thing you want to do is print another 500 copies, only for 75 to sell and the rest to just sit there. In the mean time, manga license periods are quite short -- sometimes as short as two years. If sales were low to begin with and the license period is almost up, it doesn't make sense to do another print run.

This is a major reason why manga license rescues aren't much of a thing. There's no telling how many copies of the old edition are sitting around on store shelves or in warehouses somewhere, and the odds of the market being too saturated to justify another print run can be quite high.

And so, Digital Manga and several other companies have been resorting to Kickstarter to do reprints, and to reissue classic titles that only appeal to a small niche of fans. It's the only surefire way of taking the risk out of the equation for smaller, niche titles. But for smaller, less prestigious titles (like most yaoi), it's just not on the radar. The manga might have to be re-licensed, and who knows if the digital files to print them were archived correctly. Usually, it's just not worth it.

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Justin Sevakis has worked in the anime business for nearly 20 years. He's the founder of Anime News Network, and owner of the video production company MediaOCD. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap.