I just saw your answer to the question about Canada and thou

[Vertical Inc]

I just saw your answer to the question about Canada and thought it was really interesting. Being from the UK, I'm interested in how much of an impact UK sales have for you? Vertical books are pretty easy to get in shops over here, even in Waterstones (the UK equivalent of Barnes and Noble) and my local comic shop also carries most of them.

The UK is a very interesting market for us. And at the same time, because it is not our native sales territory (which is US & Canada), we do not have very accurate data on it
That said…I don’t know if you have been actively following our Twitter or Tumblr, there is a reason why I asked people to order/preorder copies of Gundam from Waterstones. That reason being, we are distributed by the world’s largest book distributor Random House - Penguin, and they tend to work with most of the world’s largest bookstore chains. And if bookstore chains get demand in-store from customers they tend to order more copies of those books for their stores…And if there is demand for those books, they might look closer at the publisher of said books and order more of their titles overall.
In the UK we are also blessed to work with Turnaround. They are one of the EU zone’s best distributors for indie bookstores and specialty shops. They have been a champion for us at book events in the UK and at comic cons over there as well. They often promote our books with the amazing UK comics publisher SelfMadeHero (honestly, I wish we could partner with them on somethings…hint hint). So with Turnaround and good Diamond Comics penetration in the UK, we have that place covered…even if we don’t know exactly to what extent.
I will say this… The UK’s totals are also around 3-5% overall for our books. However, they along with Germany and Japan make up most of our international sales (Canada not included since it is technically domestic). But for some books like Drops of Godthe UK may make up around 30% of all sales! Which is shocking cause that total is more than what we see from Barnes & Nobles, Diamond or Books-a-Million for that book!
Titles that do well in the UK are:
Flowers of Evil
Drops of God
Gundam the Origin
Tezuka (except Buddha)
Tropic of the Sea
Oh, and before I wrap this ASK up… Note the little bit added on to the Tezuka entry, cause this has to do with my next point. We do not have rights to sell Buddha in the UK. Those rights belong to HarperCollins UK.
Many of our books are only for sale in Continental North America and former/current US colonies - like the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico. Now I get this from many people… “I can buy your books through Book Depository and I live in the UK/Spain/Russia/Brazil.” Well those vendors are working through the GRAY MARKET. They are technically selling books out of market. The legality of such things is questionable. However copyright can be enforced by local rights holders if they wish to pursue such things. (And Vertical due to their region restrictions that we supply our distributors is not responsible for sales outside of each book’s sales territories.)
This is one reason why we generally do not get data outside of our main region and why we do not actively market outside of our regions. (Same reason why Spanish companies don’t care about the US market, even though they really could get some major export action to the US given how many Spanish readers are in this country and how much more Japanese content they have as a whole… I wonder how closely French pubs track sales in Quebec?)