Hot Gimmick novel!

Yay!  It’s way too late and I should be in bed but… the last volume of Hot Gimmick beckoned.  I loved it.  Ryoki was an irritable romantic, Hatsumi finally grew most of a spine but actually thought the words, “Maybe if we got married, he’d finally be nice to me.”  arg!  But also heh, in an appalling sort of way.  It’s so them.  The last half of the book has an incredibly cute Akane/Subaru story and…

The Hot Gimmick novel will be out in English in February 2007!  I’ve heard mixed reviews about the alternate ending, but I’m definitely going to look forward to it.

Rocking out with Mokona

Just because it’s been a rambling kind of night… here’s the ending theme song for xxxHOLIC.

Why Tokyopop sucks

(Updated at the top because this post is too long – I can’t tell if I actually sound mad here.  I’m not – it’s kind of a low grade irritation, along the same lines of but below my irritation at the library for choosing to not catalogue most of their paperback collection and therefore rendering it inaccessible to anyone who is looking for a specific book and is not lucky enough to find it on the shelf the day they think to look.  In both cases, it ends up costing me extra money.)  :) 

That would be their decision to stop selling previously established titles in stores and selling them exclusively through their website.  They’ve also picked some new, upcoming books for their online only section, which makes it even worse in my mind.  There are two round-ups of blog postings that I was checking out today, one on the Newsarama Blog and one on Comics Worth Reading.

I asked my comic store friend today what she thought of TPop’s new policy and she seemed genuinely surprised by the news.  The manga girl… the one who does much of the ordering for the store.  Sigh.  When I mentioned that Dragon Head would be one of the titles, BOTH of the store employees told me I had to be wrong, since that was a really popular title and sold well.  MCSF also asked me to send her a list of the exclusive titles “since she couldn’t handle Tokyopop’s new website.”  Neither can I.  It’s why my blogroll link goes directly to their manga list now.  I made the sacrifice, though.  If you haven’t seen it elsewhere, here’s the list:

November 2006
Atomic King Daidogan, volume 1
One, volume 10
Neck and Neck, volume 6

December 2006
Heaven Above Heaven, volume 6

February 2007
Heaven!!, volume 1 (From the creator of GIRL GOT GAME, which means it would have gotten an automatic buy had it made it into the stores)
Sorcerer Hunters Authentic Relaunch, volume 8

March 2007
Arm of Kannon, volume 9
Rure, volume 1
Soul to Seoul, volume 5

April 2007
King City, volume 1
Dragon Head, volume 6
Dragon Voice, volume 8
Short Sunzen, volume 1

May 2007
The Knockout Makers, volume 1
St. Lunatic School (Yoru nimo Makezu! St. Lunatic School), volume 1

July 2007
Atelier Marie and Elie-Zarlburge Alchemist, volume 1
Monochrome Factor, volume 1

August 2007
Hiyoko ya Shoten, volume 1

Is there really a reason why so many new books are online only?  Do they think they won’t sell?  If so, why the hell do they keep licensing titles they have so little faith in?

I did the letter of complaint thing tonight on their forums, even though I doubt anyone official at Tokyopop really cares about what their customers think at this point.  Here’s what I wrote, and it’s probably a lot more polite than what I would have written had I done the full rant here.  The sad thing is, most of my early manga is from Tokyopop.  They had my loyalty as a customer, and now they seem to be actively working to lose it.  sigh.

Apparently this is the only place to leave feedback regarding Tokyopop’s decision to restrict sales of certain titles to online only.  Fine.  Here goes:

1) I live in Canada.  You are now asking me to pay $9.99 US for a title I would pay $10 Canadian for at my comic book stores (I get a 20% discount at both).  On top of exchange I would also have to pay extra for shipping, which bumps the price of a volume to at least $16.00.  That’s not counting whatever random customs fee they will also decide to charge me.  I can safely say that I will NEVER be buying a book off of your website.  There’s no way it would ever be worth it.

2)  You’re charging the same price for a book that’s been marked up twice by the time it gets to me in a store, which means you’re getting your regular publisher’s price, the middleman/distributor markup and the store markup.  I don’t buy books for the library I work for from publishers who charge cover price, I’m certainly not going to support it personally.

3)  You’re restricting access of your books to people who not only have credit cards and are willing to give out such information online (an editor suggested upthread if you have a bank card you can buy online – not everyone wants to set up these kind of payment options with their bank account), but you’re probably also assuming most of your customers are visiting your website and can find these exclusive titles among the clutter.  If you can’t sell them in stores where it’s accessible on a shelf, what makes you think you’re going to sell any more with them tucked away in your website?  If you wanted increased visibility for these titles might I suggest either increasing advertising, offering samples on your front page or in other books or NOT flooding stores with all of your titles in one week?  They might stand out a little more if they’re not hidden in the middle of 20 odd other Tokyopop new releases.

Most of my other thoughts were covered by others in previous messages, but on a personal note, you’ve managed to make me pretty leery of picking up any new series from Tokyopop if you’re going to randomly pull titles and make them unavailable to the average consumer.  I’ll be finishing the series I currently collect from Tokyopop, but won’t be picking up new ones until you’ve proven you can finish the complete run properly.  It’s a shame, too, because I looked at the list of exclusive titles and there are at least three I would have tried, and there might have been more depending on the art and how many other books I was buying that week.

To give you a rough idea of the kind of money I spend on manga, I have 29 titles on my “must buy” list (11 are from Tokyopop, but 4 are ending in within one or two volumes) and another 33 on my “usually buy” list (again, 11 of these are from Tokyopop).  I realize I’m only one customer (and as an adult I don’t seem to be part of your target audience anyway), and the official responses here seem to be along the lines of “tough, deal with it,” but you’ve done a pretty good job of making me think less of your company.

So… too whiny?  Not irritable enough?  Should I have been pissier and do I think they would have cared anyway??  Ah well.  Viz has overtaken Tokyopop as my #1 supplier recently.  This did prompt me to go over my manga list and resort my buying priority levels…

If you’re interested, here are the results: