Okay, what I don't get about pricing is: if a type of manga

[Vertical Inc]

Okay, what I don't get about pricing is: if a type of manga sells less, why raise the price? Wouldn't that lower your sales even more? Especially with ebooks as they do not leave you with extra copies that have to be sold if they are less popular than expected?

In regards to your first question… I’ll start by saying, we haven’t raised prices, so I do not know what the motivations are for other publishers who have. I recommend contacting them to get a better understanding of their business strategies.

However, in general business terms companies have differing pricing structures all the time. Not every car is priced the same. An economy car is cheaper than a luxury car. Obviously quality will be different. Now a car company might sell more cars if their luxury cars are cheaper but those cars are more expensive to make.

Also lower prices do mot guarantee sales either. So notice how when we print seinen titles in shonen-sized book trims they usually are shonen priced. Well those seinen titles aren’t popular but we priced them less because they were cheaper to make. We lost money on those titles cause just having cheaper books does not guarantee sales. It may have cost more to translate/edit and acquire cause the quality is higher, and we still lost money.

In almost all cases companies know items are not as demanded still need to recoup costs at the same rate as their popular items. So by having differing price levels they can earn the same amount of money at the same rate with differing sales numbers.

For example… I earn $7 per $30 Gundam sold. I earn $3.5 from a $13 Knights of Sidonia. Meanwhile I earn $2 per every $11 Flowers of Evil. So while Flowers of Evil is cheaper it has to do a lot more work (have a lot more sales) to break even when compared to Gundam. And Sidonia earns more money faster too, which is important because Sidonia and Gundam are more expensive to make.

Ironically the more expensive book out of the three in that example is the best selling one. Actually Sidonia does better than Flowers of Evil now also. So as you can see price doesn’t always impact spending when people understand the qualit; whether it’s quality of content or production.

Regarding eBooks… Our prices have not gone up there either. So once again I do not know exactly why other publishers are raising prices.

Now personally I believe eBooks should be cheaper than paper books. Printing costs are irrelevant. They are usually only 10% of a book’s cover price. So I think eBooks should always be at least 10% cheaper. There are file conversion fees but they are one time fees (many manga are only printed once but that’s another story). And yes there are no warehouse fees, which is great since those things add up. However, are other costs associated to eBooks.

Royalties -you know money paid to the author- is usually 3 to 4 times higher. So publishers earn less per eBook sold.

Online platforms like Apple or Comixology take up to 50% per sale. That’s higher than most retail stores.

And then there are regular issues like distributors. If your publisher works with one, also still get a percentage of each sale. As with everything, there are also additional license fees and price restrictions from Japan.

(Note Japanese eBook prices are sometimes the same price as the print editons!!)

Publishers also get paid upfront for printed books shipped to stores, not for books sold to customers. So if I ship 10000 copies of a book, I get paid for those books in advance. While I only get paid for every eBook sold, since I don’t have to ship eBooks. It might take a year to sell the same 10000 copies as eBooks. (Might take longer since discoverability for eBooks is currently harder.)

So knowing this, we at Vertical keep our eBook prices significantly lower than the paper editions - usually around 30% cheaper. Once again we could charge more, and we could earn more, but we have made this decision. And we’ll stick to it for now.

…That said, eBook sales are generally only around 10% of a comic book’s overall sales. So those eBooks are earning less per sale at a slower rate also.

Maybe that is why other companies have raised their eBook prices. It is possible those publishers noticed sales were bad so they thought “why just lose many AND not earn money faster; when we can at least earn more from the few transactions we have”.

(Note: eBook sales are much better for novels. However novel prices for eBooks are generally higher than manga prices. Not sure why that is but that’s just an industry wide trend.)