With the recent news of  layoffs at Tokyopop, I started thinking again of Sam Costello’s reaction to a Tokyopo OEL title, The Dreaming:

The Dreaming was very good indeed and much better than I’d expected… It’s atmospheric, tense (a comic! a comic that’s actually tense - wow), good looking, and mysterious. And - bonus - it’s a horror mystery, rather than a gorefest. If you like Picnic at Hanging Rock or other atmospheric horror movies or books, you should really check it out.

The problem came, though, when I was done with the book, psyched about it, and wanting to find out when I could buy the next volume.

I went to the website of the book’s creator, Queenie Chan, to see what I could learn there. And what I learned bummed me out quite a bit: the next volume of The Dreaming isn’t due until 2006 (no specific month given), with the third and final volume not due until 2007.

And this is where the problem comes in. Other manga series have new volumes much more often - at least a couple of times a year, if not more - and that works to their advantage. They can come out at that clip because the biggest part of the work on them - the writing and the drawing - has been completed; it’s touch ups and translations and rewrites that have to be done before publishing here. Asia-native manga can also come out faster because TokyoPop is working from a backlog of material, possibly years’ worth, when they start publishing a series.

This seems not to be the case with the OEL. It looks like they’re being created roughly in synch with the publication schedule. I know there’s a lot of work that goes into these books, and I want the creators to take the time they need to make the books great, but potentially having to wait 2 years to finish the story is going to be kind of a bummer, and might kill some of the momentum, both storywise and saleswise, that these books generate.

To some degree, I think this is an issue of packaging setting the wrong expectations — they look like a product that comes out at a high frequency (namely the rest of Tokyopop’s output). The OEL titles are a very different product for Tokyopop, not just because they don’t come from Japan or Korea but also in terms of the products’ strengths and needs.

Tokyopop’s past history has seen many series launched with minimal marketing. Plenty of titles are released every month, reducing the share of attention each title gets from the marketing department and making each title more reliant on having a strong fanbase before the title makes a commerical English language debut. Tokyopop’s opertaional philosophy is often described as "quantity over quality" on internet discussion forums.

(And, speaking of minimal marketing, has anyone noticed any signs of Tokyopop’s "Manga After Hours" marketing initiative?)

The OEL titles are a new beast for Tokyopo with some unique challenges. For one thing, the "quantity" factor isn’t there, there isn’t enough material (or the funds to produce enough material before selling it) to quickly give a series the kind of shelf space it can easily get with moderate popularity and a large number of volumes in print. Buzz is also more challenging to maintain as readers have a whole year to forget about a series before the next chapter arrives — additionally, some readers may choose to defer sampling Tokyopop’s OEL titles, since there’s a long window until the next release. There’s less danger of falling behind on an OEL title than, say, Great Teacher Onizuka.

Personally, while I picked up Steady Beat soon after release (I think it took two weeks from when the series appeared on Diamond’s shipping list, until I found it in a bookstore) I’m feeling little urgency in picking up The Dreaming or Dramacon (two other OEL titles I want to check out). My purchasing lethargy isn’t borne out of any disinterest in those series — it’s just that the longer it takes for me to sample these titles, the shorter my wait will be for the next segment. This is how I approach graphic novels from American publishers and that seems an apt view for Tokyopop’s OEL offerings.

The problem, however, is that this kind of product requires a very different treatment compared to Tokyopop’s other offerings. A long-term marketing campaign is necessary, since discussion about the title isn’t being renewed by virtue of new volumes (with new story details to discuss) arriving every other month. Accounting must also judge success differently, understanding how more marketing dollars spent over a longer period can turn a greater profit over the long run (an idea that seems at odds with Tokyopop’s current operations).

Before foretelling the doom of Tokyopop, I think it’s important to remember that Tokyopop has successfully mutated once before, When the Mixx and Smile magazines struggled to grow in the Direct Market, they turned towards more mainstream markets, cut production costs by leaving manga unflipped and calling it a feature, and dramatically dropped their price points.

It seems to me, with licensing opportunities becoming more competitive, Tokyopop is at another point in its history where it has to adapt to a changing market. I’m hoping that will mean that Tokyopop will look back and revisit some of their missed opportunities. It’s likely that Tokyopop has some creatively strong series in their backlist that haven’t fully met their sales potential, it would be satisfying to see some of these titles getting a renewed push. A similar, sustained marketing effort is needed by Tokyopop’s OEL titles, but by including their backstock in the effort raises the potential financial rewards (by virtue of having titles with plenty of volumes to sell).

Such a move would be president-setting since most manga marketing efforts (aside from Viz’s anthology magazines) rely on the title’s pre-existing fanbase to generate buzz… but setting industry precedents isn’t unfamiliar territory to Tokyopop. It’s time to innovate again.