Licensed publishing has its limits, since it requires licensees to take financial risks. By taking on some of that risk ourselves, we have the ability to decide on our own whether to publish titles in English for our authors and readers. We at Square Enix are excited for the opportunity to contribute to our authors/creators’ and readers’ happiness in a more direct way.
We believe that this new program will create favorable conditions for us to deliver titles that are not yet available to our readers here.
Publishing directly will also mean that we can take the North American market into consideration from the very beginning of the planning and development phase of each manga series or book. We may even be able to consider developing original products that cater to readers in North America and other English-speaking regions worldwide.
The biggest opportunity for us is that we now have a direct connection to our readers here with our own products to be released soon. This will allow us to learn more about the market and our new audience, and that alone will be an invaluable source for our future opportunities.
Will you be publishing to just the U.S. or to a broader region?
Our plan is to make our English editions of Square Enix manga and books available worldwide. However, for some titles there might be some restrictions for the regions we will be able to publish/distribute.
Why are you prioritizing print manga over digital?
We believe that print format manga is (as of now) what the readers here would prefer more than its digital counterpart. Having said that, we are working towards providing the digital version of our titles as soon as possible, ideally at the same timing when we hit our first on sale date of our print format manga in February.
You had initially announced that your first books would be published in fall and winter 2019, but now it looks like they will be coming out early next year. What happened to change that schedule?
We’ve gone through this whole internal conversation and we decided to make changes to our schedule.
We could have taken the route to release our titles based on our first planned schedule, however, we decided that we reach out to as many readers as possible and make sure that we are not dropping any of our major sales channels and still making it as close as possible with the schedule we first announced.
How will Square Enix be different from the other manga publishers in the U.S.? Do you plan to focus on a particular genre or format?
Not only manga but we will be presenting novels, art books and other books related to our games.
We hope to give more opportunities for our game lovers to get to know more about manga and vice versa.
Do you have any titles you particularly want to bring to North America?
As we’re hoping to introduce our breadth of titles through this English publishing program, in addition to what we’ve just announced at Anime NYC (6 new licenses), we would very much hope to publish such titles as LGBT manga, as well as game tie-in artbooks and manga in the near future.
In terms of retail sales, will you be marketing to comic shops as well as bookstores?
Yes, with the support from PRHPS [Penguin Random House Publishing Services].
Will you be doing anything special to market these books to gamers as well as manga readers?
We have two novels that are game tie-ins planned for releasing in 2020. We will continue to work together with our PR teams to engage with our audience.
Also, we’ve been having lots of conversations with our book editorial team and now working on planning to develop a new book which is catered mainly towards our North American audience. Please watch out for more to come.
You have been involved with the American manga scene for a long time, going back to your time at JManga. What have you learned from your experiences that you didn’t know when you started out?
The love of manga by the readers here is no different from those of Japanese readers or even stronger for some extent which is really great. The market has been in a healthier condition after that downward trend which stopped in 2013 and since then picking up strongly and steadily by those readers to support the growth of the market!
What have you most enjoyed about this Square Enix experience so far?
It’s been over six years since I joined Square Enix and we are really fortunate that we have been able to create this connection and the bond with people we met all over the world through this one common thing, "the love of content." It has been an amazing experience so far and has given me an inspiration to take the step forward.
Square Enix announced five new manga titles at AnimeNYC (see "AnimeNYC: Square Enix Announces Five New Manga").