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Manga Answerman - How often do English publishers sell at a loss?

IIRC around 2009-2010 Viz quietly stopped publishing several manga which had always sold poorly but which they'd been obligated to publish due to Shueisha's relationships with the artists

I'm still curious why Viz is still publishing Kaze Hikaru. Now, don't get me wrong, it's a great series, but over the past 6 or 7 years, they've been doing one volume a year. And it's not because they've caught up to Japan either (I think we have 26 vols here and in Japan, it's over 40). I'm kind of wondering why they're bothering at all, it can't be selling well, it was already pretty niche to begin with, and it has its hardcore fans, yes, but when they're clearly just being forced to put out one a year, what's even the point at that point? Is it this something they have to do per their Japanese licensor or something? Does that sort of thing happen sometimes? Also, if they're only putting out one vol a year, why can't it be an omnibus? It'd get a bit more of the material out, and my understanding on manga publishing rules following the Japanese rules of "by the physical book printed", you'd think that's cut the printing overhead by a good amount (of course, you'd be paying to translate two volumes, but at least it'd only count as printing 1 bigger book, not 2 smaller ones, which is cheaper to my understanding).

Also, while I definitely understand that the industry was going through a rough spot when Viz dropped Gintama and Reborn, why can't they pick them back up now? Gintama, especially, seems to have a pretty rabid and large fanbase.

Then there is the odd situation like Drops of God, where it seems Vertical was happy enough with the sales, but it was the Japanese creators that were unhappy with the fact that Vertical couldn't get them more exposure and sales as good as other markets overseas, and therefore I think just cut the contract on them, and so far no other publisher has picked it up...

zawa113 wrote:

I'm still curious why Viz is still publishing Kaze Hikaru. Now, don't get me wrong, it's a great series, but over the past 6 or 7 years, they've been doing one volume a year. And it's not because they've caught up to Japan either (I think we have 26 vols here and in Japan, it's over 40). I'm kind of wondering why they're bothering at all, it can't be selling well, it was already pretty niche to begin with, and it has its hardcore fans, yes, but when they're clearly just being forced to put out one a year, what's even the point at that point? Is it this something they have to do per their Japanese licensor or something? Does that sort of thing happen sometimes? Also, if they're only putting out one vol a year, why can't it be an omnibus? It'd get a bit more of the material out, and my understanding on manga publishing rules following the Japanese rules of "by the physical book printed", you'd think that's cut the printing overhead by a good amount (of course, you'd be paying to translate two volumes, but at least it'd only count as printing 1 bigger book, not 2 smaller ones, which is cheaper to my understanding). Also, while I definitely understand that the industry was going through a rough spot when Viz dropped Gintama and Reborn, why can't they pick them back up now? Gintama, especially, seems to have a pretty rabid and large fanbase.

It is unclear if the manga fandom for gintama is just a small but vocal crowd or if it's truly big. The lack of much movement from the companies licensing the animes and virtually little to no fandom in America suggests it's not as big as people suggest. Perhaps the western English speaking world enjoys it but those fans are not in America.

What does tend to happen instead when a title doesn't have strong sales is that print runs may be cut. This is partly why latter volumes of a given manga series may go out of print more quickly that earlier volumes, because fewer copies were printed, and there are simply fewer available. Also, the frequency of publication may be cut – meaning that instead of quarterly, a new volume may come out every 6 or 12 months or more.