That’s the lead story at PW Comics Week, with CPM head John O’Donnell summing it up thusly:
“We took some heavy punches,” says O’Donnell about the recent restructuring. “It’s like we went through emergency surgery. We’ve been rehabbing and now we’re walking around again. We hung in there and made the changes that were necessary for us to survive.”
CPM never filed bankruptcy, but the Musicland chain did, and since Musicland accounted for 30% of their DVD sales, CPM suffered as well. Anyway, they’ve taken their medicine and now they are back, and at Yaoi-Con they announced 17 titles to be published between now and next summer, including a new one from Youka Nitta.
O’Donnell says the house will likely “add stuff as we go along” in the second quarter. “We’ve got hundreds of licenses bought and paid for that we had to put on hold,” says O’Donnell.
That’s kind of interesting. I wonder what they have on ice. More from O’Donnell:
He compares today’s hot manga market to the development of the anime market, noting with dismay the fast rise in the number of titles. “Everyone with a book with big-eyed characters is jumping in the market trying to play the market share game,” he says. “They don’t care if they’re losing money. It’s ‘whoever publishes the most titles wins.’ We can’t compete with that. We don’t have a parent company we can go to for more money. We live and die by our business sense.”
I’m not sure he’s right about the first part. It seems like the smaller companies, like DramaQueen and DMP (which he cites a few lines later) and Go!Comi and Seven Seas, are doing just the opposite, starting with a few titles and tending them carefully. The pile ’em high strategy didn’t work out so well for ADV, and a lot of people aren’t to thrilled with the way it’s playing out for Tokyopop either (although you can’t argue that it works for Viz). So it’s nice to hear that O’Donnell will be substituting “business sense” for mass quantities of new releases.
Hah! Industry gossip used to hold that O’Donnell’s idea of “business sense” was a bizarre set of schemes of scalar packages of a few tony “A” titles, some middlebrow “B” titles, and lots of “C” crap, and the “B” stuff generally fell through the cracks. This is how we got buried under by rubbish like Crystal Triangle, Dog Soldier, and Roots Search back in the anime paleolithic.
People change, but historically O’Donnell has a reputation for the polar opposite of business sense, and an ingrained fondness for firehose tactics.