BackQ&A | Kevin Hamric
America's largest manga publisher says their comics will be available in India soon
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Comic relief
Viz Media is the biggest publisher of Japanese manga translated into English in the US, and as a licensee, the company has been steadily growing its presence from the US and Europe to the Philippines. Kevin Hamric, director, publishing, marketing and sales, Viz Media, was in India last week, and he told us that Viz is bringing their manga to book stores by January.
We spoke to Hamric about the audience for manga in India, and how Viz sees that developing over time. Edited excerpts:
What impression do you have of the size of the market here? Why do you think it’s a good market to enter now?
I don’t want to put just a number to this, but I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm, and a lot of potential here. I mean one way to look at it is that Random House and Simon & Schuster are also here, and that tells you something, right? We’ve been studying the market, and we’ve been talking to people like Comic Con India, and also retailers like Flipkart and Landmark. Another thing is that anime has done well on TV here, and generally speaking, where TV does well, the books do well.
What titles will you be launching?
We’re going to get off to a slow start in India, we’re going to release the big series, like Naruto, Bleach, Death Note. We’re going to slowly add more titles, and we’re not going to bring 4,000 books at once. We’ll start by bringing the first few issues and the last few issues of the big titles, for new readers and fans both.
New books will come to India in just a month of the Japan release. Our team works on the international editions ahead of the US editions to make sure there’s the least delay possible.
Can you tell us what the prices will be?
It’s not something we can talk about right now, but we’ll be pricing our books very carefully. We’re going to dig into our margin so as to help the market grow here, and we’re going to make sure that our prices are under what the market can bear. We’re obviously a business, but I think we’re also proud of the fact that we don’t gouge the readers. You go to the Amazon pages of some of our collector’s issues, and you’ll see people commenting, saying, “Viz, I’d happily pay more" and that’s great. The market is a tiny niche, and audience growth has to be everyone’s focus.
Comic books are growing but they’re still pretty small in India. Do you see this changing anytime soon?
No I think it’s going to remain a niche interest for a while here. That’s not a problem—there are enough fans to make it possible to do business here, and they are people who are passionate about their interests. The Internet has made it possible to hear from these people, and for them to meet each other.
We were literally getting a hundred emails every month, from people who wanted to know why Viz isn’t active in India, and that’s why we decided to look into the market. I got a mail from a manga club in a college in India, and couldn’t remember the name later, so I looked for it on Facebook, and was shocked to see how many results I got.
These fans live on social media, and that’s a platform we’re going to be very active on. The fans drive the marketplace, and we’re going to focus pretty closely on them now.
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