Tokyopop cut back on their UK manga releases by 20%
Paul •
Following up last week’s report on Tokyopop‘s internal restructuring, theBookseller.com have published a short interview with Tokyopop‘s new UK sales and marketing manager Andrew Whelan that confirms their intentions to reduce the total amount of manga they publish in the UK by 20%, cutting down from 25 seperate releases (manga volumes) per month to 20. This is in reaction to their falling UK sales (“UK sales dropping by 4.1% by volume“) despite an overall boost in the UK graphic novels industry as a whole (“40.2% rise in the UK graphic novels market “). Quotes from Andrew Whelan below:
“We are now sharing space and market share more than ever before. In the past, we have had 80–90% of the market; now it’s about 50/50. […] If you keep churning out stuff, eventually you reach saturation point, [so] in a way not printing as much is a good option. But we are only going to drop series that don’t sell. Essentially, we only do the best of the best.”
