Ask John: Why Do Manga in America Cost So Much?

Question:
Many of the manga I buy in the United States cost about $10, but a similar volume in Japan costs only $5 or less. I know that when a manga is printed in the United States there is some effort for translation and research, but it seems like the profit margin on US printed manga must be very high. Is that true? Do you know how much it costs a US publisher to produce a manga?

One of the reasons manga is so popular in Japan is that it is very cheap. Even people who aren’t especially interested in manga can follow a series they like without spending a fortune. I wonder if US publishers aren’t shooting themselves in the foot. Only otaku are willing to pay $10 per volume, so manga will always be just a niche market. It can never become popular among the general public at the current prices. Do you have any insight into the pricing of US published manga?

Answer:
I’ve worked with domestic anime DVD releases, but not manga publishing. So I’m somewhat familiar with the profit margins associated with DVDs, I’m not very conscious of the precise costs and earnings of manga publishing. However, I do know of some of the expenses that manga publishing incurs, and I’m fairly familiar with the commercial workings of the American anime industry. Manga is significantly cheaper in Japan than America because it can be cheaper in Japan than America. A book that sells 100 number of copies at $10 may generate a similar profit to a book that sells 1,000 copies at $4 each. Japanese manga publishing is subsidized by other publications, media, and product lines sold by the publisher. Japanese publishers profit from spin-off merchandise related to the manga title. Japanese publishers don’t have to pay royalties and licensing fees to the master licensor because they are the master licensor. None of these circumstances typically apply to American publishers. Furthermore, Japan has exponentially more consumers that purchase manga than America does. So sales volume allows for lower per-volume price in Japan compared to America.

America’s anime and manga distributors are not greedy. Sometimes shortsighted, certainly. But they’re not trying to reap massive profit margins. They’re trying to earn enough profit to survive and hopefully expand. Last summer Viz Media formally raised the cover price on its Shonen Jump and Shoujo Beat manga lines from their previous $7.99 and $8.99 to $9.99. Viz explained the increase saying, “VIZ Media made the decision to stay consistent with the pricing in the marketplace for this industry, which in some cases might be a slight increase from previous years.” Similarly, select manga from Dark Horse Comics have also seen a dollar per volume price increase. Especially in a tight economy, no publisher wants to increase the price of luxury goods, risking the possibility of pricing them out of the comfortable spending range of average consumers. Domestic manga graphic novels aren’t cheaper than they are because domestic publishers simply can’t survive on lower retail prices and similar sales volume. The outside observer philosophy may suggest that lower retail prices boost sales, but due to the percentage nature of retail profit margins, a product at a lower price has to sell an exponentially greater number copies to generate the same revenue as fewer sales at a higher price point. Cutting the price of domestic manga by a third probably won’t increase sales volume by three times, thus the price cut ends up hurting the publisher more than it helps. Furthermore, printing a massive number of graphic novels is, itself, a risky proposition. When a DVD distributor distributes 10,000 copies of a DVD to retailers, after three months retailers may return thousands of unsold discs and demand a refund. At least, in that instance, the DVD distributor gets its unsold DVDs back. Book publishing is slightly different. After a publisher sells 10,000 copies of a manga to retailers, the biggest nationwide retailer chains may simply discard the unsold books and demand a refund from the publisher. That may not be especially fair, but that’s the way the business works, and publishers have to either work with it or work around it.

Icarus Publishing’s domestic erotic manga retail at $20 a book. That seems outrageous, but it’s actually about double the cost of the same book in Japan – which is parallel to the domestic cost of most manga. Icarus Publishing is also a small, independent publisher that needs to maximize profits on every book sold. Domestic manga publishers including Studio Ironcat, Broccoli Books, DramaQueen, and Comics One have folded. CPM Press died with its parent company. Infinity Studios seems inactive. ADV Manga is inactive. Presently the industry average $9.99 per manga volume seems to be the fulcrum between a price the market will sustain and the minimum domestic publishers need to function healthily. That $9.99 average does seem to be slowly inching upward, suggesting that rising costs and a consumer market that’s not growing significantly are making price increases an unavoidable necessity.

Manga is a culturally established commodity in Japan, although it seems to be increasingly moving toward digital distribution from traditional print. The same may not be the case in America. American newspapers continue to marginalize comics. I think it’s reasonable to anticipate that America wouldn’t see a dramatic surge of comic reading even if the entire American comic book industry dropped its average retail price to .25 a book. Price does have some impact on the American market potential of comics. I know I’d buy many more manga than I do if they were all a dollar a book. But for countless millions of Americans, the difference between a $4 and a $10 manga is irrelevant because they’re not interested in manga at any price. So domestic publishers have to bear that situation in mind and price their translated manga with a compromise between attractive affordability and a price that allows sustainability. The manga publishing industry is different in Japan than it is in America. And the consumer interest in manga is different in Japan than it is in America. So manga will never be as popular in America, nor as inexpensive in America as they are in Japan.