Via Manganews, which is becoming the morning paper for serious manga fans, comes the news that three of the four initial Go!Comi titles have gone back for second printings. From the press release:
Go! Media CEO David Wise explained that both CANTARELLA 1 and TENSHI JA NAI!! 1 were completely out of stock at the time of the reprinting, while HER MAJESTY’S DOG 1, which had an initial print-run of 10,000 copies, had insufficient inventory to service its pending orders. He added that the reprinting is complete and all three books are now back in stock at Go!Comi’s distributor, Diamond Books.
This shows that I am, as usual, a bit out of synch, as my favorite title is the one that didn’t get reprinted, Crossroad.
However, this news makes me happy as I really like what Go!Comi has done. Their dedication to quality, both in the choice of titles and in the production of individual books, was noticeable, and it’s no coincidence that they have done well. The press release notes that Go!Comi sold 50,000 books in four months, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it goes on to say that Volume 2 sales are better than Volume 1, and pre-orders for Volume 3 are even higher. So the potential for growth is there.
I also really admired their cautious start-up. So many new comics publishers seem to just dump a dozen titles on the market, but they really were relatively restrained, concentrating on quality in content and production, as you say. Nice to see it pay off for them.
Actually, CROSSROAD is selling about as well as CANTARELLA and TENSHI. The reason it’s not being reprinted is that we printed more copies of it to begin with! (We kind of got chickenhearted at the last minute and cut the print-run of the other two books. Dumb move, in retrospect.) We expect to reprint CROSSROAD before year’s end.
BTW, I think 50,000 in four months copies is pretty darned good for an independent publisher with only 8 titles. In fact our per-volume sales average is actually 30% higher than of one of our major competitors’.
I didn’t mean to slight the achievement—reprinting your entire first list is definitely something to brag about! It’s just that intial printings seem to be smaller in the manga world than what I was used to when I edited illustrated books. It’s been a long time, but I think a first printing was closer to 40,000 than 10,000 at the publisher I worked for the longest.
My concern is purely selfish—I want Go!Comi to live long and prosper so I can keep reading Cantarella and Crossroad!
[...] 10,000: Go!Comi’s first printing on their first volumes, which sold out and have gone back for second printings. [...]