Maybe it’s just my store or maybe most manga readers are trained now to go to Borders. They supported manga before Barnes & Noble and we’ve just been playing catch up since, to less than stellar results.

I didn’t look at them too long though because I gave up on superhero comics about a year ago (although I still wanna catch up on Runaways, She-Hulk, and some others in trades eventually) and it seems so hard to pick out the non-superhero graphic novels that are mixed in with them. A lot of the spines are very thin and you really have to study them as you scan to get a good read on the titles.

Okay, so this really has nothing to do with what you’re talking about but I was just really excited about having them ask me for a recommendation list and I just wanted to tell someone about it!

So today I drove about an hour to get to a city that has a Waldenbooks & Barnes & Noble. I haven’t been back there in over a year because I’ve mostly ordered my books through Barnes & Noble website.

The Waldenbooks is even better than it was back then. Almost their entire right wall is manga (which is had been last year too but there was one very surprising nice change) and while I was scanning their titles I noticed some random yaoi in the mix. I was excited but then disappointed that they didn’t have the series I was looking for but then….

I got to the very end of the wall and there was row after row of yaoi. Six or seven shelves of it (the complete series I was looking for was there too). At first I thought it was just their strictly yaoi corner but then I noticed the shelves below it had Sensual Phrase and other straight adult manga. So even though the sign above it all just says “manga” and not “adult” it’s actually their own little adult section.

The clerk was super nice & friendly and even mentioned the yaoi I was buying. It was so weird to have someone say “yaoi” to me with a big smile on their face when I’m so used to the booksellers in my town not even knowing anything about manga. I mentioned the adult section and she said how that way when kids are over there looking at the stuff they know what they’re looking at. I don’t know if they shoo them away from it after that if they look really young though or what. In any case besides keeping kids away from it I think it’s great that all the adult manga is together because that way I can (and other adults!) find it a lot easier. A lot of it is shrink-wrapped too but not all of it.

Do you ever find that if you have someone really friendly & sweet checking you out that it makes you want to buy even more stuff? Maybe I’m just too gulliable & sappy that way but whenever I get a bookstore employee that’s really friendly & helpful it always makes me want to buy more. It makes me just plain happy to be buying books in a store instead of shopping online. I hate getting robot zombie employees that speak with a monotone where all the joy has been sucked out of them.

Okay, now about the Barnes & Noble. They have some yaoi mixed in with the regular manga but there’s no cool adult section like at Waldenbooks. It’s a huge store and that kind of made it a little less fun for me. The check-out lady was nice but didn’t say anything about my books so there’s no real story to tell there. Nice cross-section of people looking at the manga though. A super tall teenage boy, teenage girls, a young boy scarfing up all the Naruto his arms could hold, a man & woman in their 30s, and some mom on her cell phone talking to her daughter saying “Okay, I’m in front of the Tokyopop cardboard display…now what book did you say you were looking for?” There was a good variety of people in front of the Waldenbooks manga too.

Okay, so this has been a super long comment. Just wanted to tell you about my day. I’ve never commented before so I should probably tell you I read your blog all the time & love it.

I pretty much always have a bad experience at B&N’s with shelves a mess, titles out-of-order, the division between YA GNs and adult GNs being unclear and inconsistent stocking for series (which always seems to miss the volume I want).

Now, when I went into the metro Borders Express to drop off an Iris Print sampler and my own personal titles catalogue [/plug] the woman there asked me if there were companies that published just manwha, and I told her about ICE and Net–gave her some places to web search as well. I got the impression that, as manager, she can and will ask for specific titles from the “supply” department, if she thinks her store can move them. I wonder if it’s just a matter of walking into your local shop with a cheat-sheet, for local managers that may not know what’s out there, but are in a position to make requests from regional mangers, for inventory. 0_o.