Thursday, January 29, 2004
Manga sales numbers in Japan...
Geeze, this stuff is not easy to find. I'm trying a lot of stuff, but not getting all that far. This thread and some previous ones are prompting me to try, though.
That thread does link here, a French page listing sales from publishers in France, the US, and Japan. For hahas, I did some division and Kodansha is 24 times bigger than Marvel in terms of sales. Considering manga is a lot cheaper in Japan than the US (those digests tend to be $3-4US), that is quite the feat. Shogakukan and Shueisha are barely any smaller either.
The only thing I could find on my own was this PDF. It gives a breakdown of how larger the industry was in 2002 in both dollar and volume sales, and what percentage of the publishing industry it accounted for in each. It also gives a chart from 1983-97, showing how sales of manga for kids has stayed relatively the same, while manga for adults has grown to be about half of the industry now. There is also some history of the industry and information on editors. Pretty good stuff..
It seems like a lot of the publishing info. tends to be from the The Research Institute
for Publications (Shuppan Geppou). It was both in Dreamland Japan and that PDF, so it might be a good source of information if anyone can manage to contact them directly. I may try to e-mail that guy in the PDF to see if he has more information...
That thread does link here, a French page listing sales from publishers in France, the US, and Japan. For hahas, I did some division and Kodansha is 24 times bigger than Marvel in terms of sales. Considering manga is a lot cheaper in Japan than the US (those digests tend to be $3-4US), that is quite the feat. Shogakukan and Shueisha are barely any smaller either.
The only thing I could find on my own was this PDF. It gives a breakdown of how larger the industry was in 2002 in both dollar and volume sales, and what percentage of the publishing industry it accounted for in each. It also gives a chart from 1983-97, showing how sales of manga for kids has stayed relatively the same, while manga for adults has grown to be about half of the industry now. There is also some history of the industry and information on editors. Pretty good stuff..
It seems like a lot of the publishing info. tends to be from the The Research Institute
for Publications (Shuppan Geppou). It was both in Dreamland Japan and that PDF, so it might be a good source of information if anyone can manage to contact them directly. I may try to e-mail that guy in the PDF to see if he has more information...
