I asked a similar question but regarding scanlations in another forum and I can understand now why scanlations can take a while to show up between chapters, and from raw to release, but why does licensed manga take months to complete just one volume?. For a volume, I don't consider it too expensive but what really puts me off is waiting half a year (from what I can gather) to possibly longer to continue to the next volume. Given the resources, shouldn't they be out far sooner?.

Well, the companies wanna milk the most of it. Get people to buy it and all. Also, they can't get ahead of where the Japanese are. You know that a lot of the time, the Japanese volumes are put out at the same rate as the English volumes? But they just started first...and that's why the English stuff is behind by a year or more. (None of this is a fact for EVERY series, but it's common)

________________
A just ruler amongst tyrants

Normally it's one volume every 2-3 months. Nothing wrong with that.
However, when something isn't selling like it's supposed to; releases get more spread out.

For me, it would make more business sense to release multiple volumes at once assuming that all of the Japanese volumes have been released already if not years ago. Given the choice to read a scanlation or a legit copy, for speed, I would go for a scanlation. I don't buy things like films, as once i've done watching them, they never get watched ever again, and frankly, it's likely to be the same with manga. So having gone with a scanlation, chances of me being a licensed manga because I want to read it is pretty slim.

I think there may be a number of reasons English releases are slow.
As BarbaPapa said 2-3 month intervals are not bad. I mean, in Japan its seems that readers may get only a chapter a month for some series and publications, and to me that would be very frustrating.

But it would be more prudent for a company to release one volume at a time. If the first volume or two do not sell very well at all, the company could decide not to waste more money and stop the series. Whereas if they released a whole series all at once and very few people bought it, they would loose a whole bunch of money.

Also, some US companies have had financial and other problems and have had to put series on hold, so we haven't seen any releases lately, such as ADV.

Some volume releases are deliberately withheld, such as with Viz, so that people will buy their magazines like Shojo Beat to read the manga, but the series is already translated.

Some companies are just small still, so they don't have the resources to spit out release after release.

my problem with licensed manga is the markup.
a volume in japan is 350 yen and a volume in the states is $13.50
translators couldn't possibly charge so much to bump the price by 400%
if licensed manga came out the same day, it wouldn't be fast enough to make me buy it.

(i've spent over $1500 on anime and manga and i've decided that i've had it with the insane prices)

ps. i'm really angry right now so please excuse the rant

You're excused Cost is definitely a big concern. But $13.50? Which ones cost that much? The standard prices I have seen in bookstores is about $9.99. (This of course still isn't low enough) Some are more like $11 (I think Del Rey and one or two of the manwha companies) and Viz releases their Shounen Jump and Shojo Beat titles at $8.99 (I was glad to see a little drop here!). Unfortunately, I don't really know all the cost factors of licensing, staffing, printing, plus of course a profit margin to know if the US manga prices are in the end reasonable or ridiculis.
Anyway, if you really crave a book in hand, you can find manga a little bit cheaper like on e-bay or online sellers and such. Just a little more work finding them

I wonder if any scanlators have been hired by publishers... How cool would that be?

EDIT: And why don't they release them in digital format?

Last edited by reanimated838uk at 1:28 pm, Jul 10 2007

Dark horse and some other companies got mangas at 13.5$

________________

First, as ladybrasa mentioned, there are a lot of other costs (besides translators) involved in producing the English versions of manga. I don't know what they are either, but it's probably a lot - in any business, there are a lot of costs that aren't obvious to the consumer. The mark-up may be exorbitant or it may not, I don't know, but I love manga too much NOT to buy it.

Second, I buy a lot of manga, and I very rarely pay full cover price. There are places online that sell manga at a discount and shipping is free if your order is over a certain amount. Some non-online bookstores have sales/coupons fairly often, up to 30% off sometimes. (It's probably not appropriate to name names here, but I'd be happy to tell you in a pm if you want to know the online & non-online places I get most of my manga.) Ebay can be a good source too, though there's a LOT to look through and you have to watch the shipping charges (i.e. manga for $.99, and shipping is $10 per volume).

As far as the speed....for some they're not that far behind the Japanese releases, so not much they can do there. When the US releases are way behind the Japanese volumes, then I *do* often wish they'd just hurry up already, lol!! On the other hand, manga is an "extra" purchase for most people. If the publishers were to suddenly flood the market with catch-up volumes of every series, their total sales might not rise by much because there's only so much room in buyers' budgets for manga.

Even assuming they've got everything translated and ready to go (which is doubtful) but only want to release on a certain schedule, speeding up releases would require increased production at the factory (actual printing etc. of the books), and shipping and distributing a lot more books (bookstores only have limited shelf & backroom storage/warehouse space). Evidently this can be done (as for Naruto this summer) but if they were to do it for multiple series, it could definitely cause problems.

Overall, I'm just happy to be able to read manga in actual book form in English. While I love scanlations, there's just something about a real book!

________________
"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

Well, there were some scanlator groups that turned into publishers...I don't remember which one though.

________________
A just ruler amongst tyrants

Greetings,
wanted to remark about the high manga prices in the US.

They are deffinitly high. I can say this for sure, because they cost more than the manga books released here in germans, and that despite the dollar euro all time high.

I was in the US about 2 months ago. Almost all trading goods were cheaper due to the exchange rate and lower salestax ( we have 18%, except 9% on books food and medicine ) . It was cheaper for me to buy comics, books, clothes, CDs, cameras,.... in the US than here in germany, but Manga was more expensive. no idea why

Meh, just wanted to put in my price findings:

VIZ's "normal" series are about $9.99. Shounen Jump/Shoujo Beat series, though, can vary from $9.99 to $8.99 to $7.99. (Monster, a VIZ Signature, is $9.99; Beauty Pop, a Shoujo Beat manga, is $8.99; Naruto, of Shounen Jump, is $7.95; the larger versions of Inuyasha, Blood: The Last Vampire 2002, and Ranma 1/2 can be up to $15.95; the Di Gi Charat manga are also $12.95)

Tokyopop and ADV manga are ALWAYS $9.99. Always. (Well, in my experience, at least, which spans about four years.) Netcomics seems to agree with this price, but I've only bought one of their manga, so I can't say that that assumption is correct.

Delrey are normally $10.95, and Go Comi! and Ice! Kunion match that price.

As for Digital Manga Publishing and June, they seem to be priced around $12.95, but I haven't bought too many of their series (the local bookstore doesn't carry them, and the nearest Borders is 45 minutes away).

I'm not quite sure about Broccoli Books, though. I don't own any that list their price. I don't recall it being too high, though; I'd guess it's around $9.99.

The last publisher that I know of is Dark Horse (which normally specialises in American comics), and the only manga of theirs I've purchased have been either $14.95 (but they were for the two Trigun manga that were over 300 pages long) or $9.95 (normal-sized manga of Trigun).

Just to throw out some numbers and names. ^^ If people have issues buying manga at this price, I'd just suggest getting a job at a bookstore. I volunteer at one of the local stores, and I get the 30% employee's discount.

About what I've noticed: the cost normally has to do with the size of the manga (not always, though; Full Metal Panic! is large, but it's still only $9.99). The "normal" sizes are normally between $9.99 and $10.99 (exceptions are VIZ Shounen Jump/Shoujo Beat manga, but I think these are only exceptions because they rake in more money through selling the Shounen Jump and Shoujo Beat monthly comics), and the bigger ones are the ones that go for $13.95 or $15.95. The connection is pretty much reliant on common sense (bigger manga = more ink and more of the cover material, which is expensive in comparison to paper), though, so it's kind of unnecessary for me to mention it. ^^;

/rant

Edit: As for speed, I sometimes find the slowing of Tokyopop releases to be saddening. They used to have a schedule of releasing a new volume for a series every other month, but they've changed it to every four months or so now (or something like that). But, given the number of series I have to keep up with, I've got to say that I'm fine with it right now. I wouldn't be able to finish/keep up with any series if they sped up the publishing. And at least you can always go online to websites like this to find unlicensed manga to download if you get bored with what you have.

Last edited by xObscurexOmenx at 5:03 pm, Jul 10 2007

While the Japanese people get the chapters weekly, bi-weekly or monthly in magazines - they also have to wait for a volume release a few month.

The western publisher picked this habit up - plus a volume needs some time to get released. Just because they're fulltime workers unlike the scanlators doesn't mean that they pay attention to one manga only and start happily scanning the Japanese volume like we do. A publishing company is a firm with many releases and lots of other stuff to do (licensing, laws, workers, materials, ...) and of course also with financial interessts.


Would be nice to know the details, though. While the western publishers sure have some more costs like licensing, the other costs should be the same as the Japanese publisher has. E.g. the Japanese publisher has to pay for mangaka, assistants and the print, while the western publisher needs to pay for translators, editors and the re-print costs. Both have costs to promote the manga.
I don't really see where exactly the huge price difference is coming from since both are companys with very similiar costs, the only obvious things I see is the licence and that the western publishers are targeting a much smaller number of readers (small edition = more costs, I assume).

But then again, I never had an understanding for marketing and such stuff

________________
Sorry, I'm Late.
But I Got Lost On The Road Of Life.

Sell fewer copies = fixed costs spread out across fewer copies of the manga, yeah. Also, US editions of manga are a bit larger than the usual Japanese tankoubons, so there's some additional cost for paper, ink, & covers.

One that just occurred to me is transportation/distribution. Japan is, what, about the size of California, right? The absolute farthest they have to transport the books while staying in Japan is a heck of a lot shorter distance than just halfway across the US. Getting the books from the publisher to the bookstores is probably a bit more expensive in the US.

________________
"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992