Richardson Handjaja, publisher and editor of weekly anime and manga business newsletter Animenomics, has reported on anime and manga from the United States and Southeast Asia for the last ten years. He was the first news managing editor at MyAnimeList, the world’s largest anime and manga community website. In his first column for ICv2, he explains how recent manga publishing trends in Japan can drive strategies in the U.S.

Digital manga accounted for 73 percent of Japan’s domestic manga sales in 2024, up more than 20 points from 2019, according to the latest publishing industry data compiled by the All Japan Magazine and Book Publishers and Editors Association. Growth has slowed in recent years, however, creating urgency for manga publishers to find new sources of revenue in international markets and from IP development.

Digital remains manga’s only growing channel, as revenues from print manga volumes and manga magazines continue to decline.

Releases from digital-first titles have doubled in quantity in the last ten years and now account for 37 percent of the more than 15,000 new manga volumes published in 2024.  Releases from titles serialized in magazines, on the other hand, have remained mostly flat over the same period.

Three popular titles completed magazine serialization last year: Jujutsu Kaisen, My Hero Academia, and Oshi No Ko.  Their final paperback collections helped push December’s in-store sales of magazine-based manga volumes up by 8 percent year-over-year (for three months of manga sales rankings in Japan, see "Top 20 Manga Volumes in Japan").  Still, full-year print manga sales declined 8.6 percent compared to 2023 despite the strong year-end performance.

Manga industry observers say digital sales could hit a plateau soon; growth in that segment was in the single digits for the third year in a row.  When that plateau arrives, total manga sales, which are estimated at ¥704 billion ($4.65 billion) in 2024, will likely start to fall in the domestic Japanese market.

Manga publishers and distributors are hedging the future by expanding their digital footprint abroad. Shogakukan launched its own digital manga and light novel platform in the United States in January.  It was the last of the four major manga publishers to do so.  MangaPlaza, operated by NTT Solmare, whose domestic platform has Japan’s largest digital manga library, is appealing to more female readers and now has five times the number of romance manga titles than it did at launch three years ago. [NTT Docomo launched its new English-language digital platform, Manga Mirai, in the U.S. last week. – ed]

Publisher investments in anime, often a driver of manga IP sales outside Japan, have also increased.  Last year, 45 percent of the more than 250 newly aired television anime were adapted from manga.  This is up from an average of 34 percent in the early 2010s.  Similarly, the share of anime based on light novel titles has surged from an average of 10 percent to almost 30 percent, thanks to the popularity of the isekai fantasy genre.

In the past year, remakes of older anime titles created opportunities for publishers to refresh their catalog.  With the broadcast of Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf, Kadokawa reissued all 17 volumes of the original Spice and Wolf light novel series with new dust jackets.  In the United States, Yen Press rereleased as a web store exclusive the Spice and Wolf Anniversary Collector’s Edition, a 900-page tome that compiles the light novels into a single hardcover book.  Starting in May, Yen Press will also release new Spice and Wolf collector’s edition manga volumes from Kadokawa.

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The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.

Richardson Handjaja is the publisher and editor of Animenomics, a weekly newsletter on the business of anime and manga.