Interesting post today from Erica Friedman, President of ALC Publishing (which just happens to be the only all-yuri manga publisher in the universe). She talks about the flaming hoops that small manga publishers have to jump through in order to get the books in the hands of rabid fans.

It’s a long post, but very interesting. Two bits I liked in particular:

What does happen is that a lot of companies are run by fans, who have a middling to poor grasp of business and/or business communications. So their inability to communicate to you may seem like them fucking with you. But it is not intended to be that way. On the other hand the company may be run by suits and they don’t understand fans at all, so then it seems like they don’t give a shit. They do, but they don’t know the particular issues of fandom. Again, it’s not personal.

and

Lastly, the sad truth is that far more people buy Volume 1 of a title than will buy Volume 2 and it goes down in numbers from there. So if a publisher spends $10k to publish 6000 copies of a book and sells 2000, and doesn’t come close to breaking even, then the impetus for them to spend 8k to print 3000 copies (because even though it’s less copies, they’ll still pay license fees and royalties and the cost per book will rise, because they are printing less) and will only sell 1000 this time. And so on, as they put out more volumes. Unless pre-orders are there to pick up the slack.

Very interesting, straight talk from someone in the biz. So go read it! http://okazu.blogspot.com/2008/07/truth-about-publishing-selling-and.html

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