[...] Johanna Draper Carlson questions ICv2’s end-of-year sales figures for manga and comics [...]

That’s the tyranny of popularity, and of math — the whole $100MM could just be Naruto. We don’t get to divide the sum into equal parts for each player, there are winners and losers.

The overall volume of output has to count for something, though, right?

For 2008 I tracked 1455 new titles (of 5015) — to appear on my charts a title had to appear in the top 500 (or so) at Amazon, B&N, or Borders; or in a top 150 (or so) elsewhere.

My methods are far from scientific but I like to think the brute-force-math-and-ceaseless-data-gathering-method is worth something.

If one were to jive my 1500 with Hibbs’ 7500 total number, the manga ‘library’ grew by 20% (raw title count)

My thought is, including everyone’s backlist, the total # of titles is closer to 10,000 — so the manga library grew by 15%

I don’t think we place as much emphasis the manga backlist as we should:

1000+ New Titles — Yearly.

Granted, were talking about periodicals (in a dictionary sense: new volumes of a single title coming out periodically) and not brand new books, but still: that’s a lot of books.

$100 million in sales is nothing to sneeze at either.

For me the question isn’t why more manga pubs *can’t* make it but rather, why more manga pubs *aren’t*.

(For “the market as a whole” — and, again, I’m only looking at BookScan — # of titles increased by ~25%, while pieces went up by +1% and dollars up by +8%)

Manga is down to approximately 2005 sales levels, as ICv2 noted…

-B

Looking at this year’s BookScan numbers, there were 7842 manga books that appeared on the charts, for (approximately, doing a publisher-based count, which will be less than precise) 10.2 million pieces and $100.8 million in sales.

I calculate an average sale-per-listing of 1297 pieces and $12,853.90 in sales.

ICv2 is adding in (at least) DM figures to that as well, but that’s more rigorous than I am capable of being on a Monday morning.

Being equally un-rigorous, I count at least 1556 new “manga” titles being released during calendar 2008 (and it is more, because that doesn’t include anything from, say, Dark Horse) — or at least thirty new books every week.

Also: “average cover price” for comics is higher than $3 — look to John Miller’s Comics Chronicles, where he calculates that every month (I think)

-B

[...] ICv2 reports that MySpace Comics architect Sam Humphries has been laid off, while Johanna Draper Carlson and Andrew Wheeler comment on other news items to emerge from the [...]