Part 1: Why I make the charts
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If you are on or have been lurking on the Mangahelpers WSJ thread or the WSJ Discord server, or you had followed me on twitter @TwtOtaku_My, or you just have seen these charts somewhere online, well I am the one who had been doing them.
Most people would not want to read such a long article so here is a tldr for does who just want to get it over with.
- I think we need them.
- Inspired by Sales-GAF/ SalesERA
- Somewhat related to what I do IRL
- Thinking of what I could do for the community.
- I like doing them.
- A trigger that actually pushed me to start doing these charts
I'll not go into too much details for each of the reason, I'll try to be concise and only be mentioning the important thing. but first thing first,
Why do we even need to track manga sales?
People always talk about which manga is more popular, and sales numbers of given volume are an objective way to gauge a series performance and popularity( at least in Japan where a majority of the sales are). Whenever the current week's Oricon sales number arrive, you will see people sharing them online and there will be discussions based on the performance of a certain series or about the overall list.
But a thing to note is that Oricon is not the absolute indicator of how a series is doing, there a lot of reason to than but mainly for being kept to only giving out numbers for the 50/100 each week extremely limits most series from ever appearing on the chart, despite selling quite well overtime. Give this piece a read if you want to go deeper on how a Oricon underestimates most series performance
Simply put, Oricon is just a tracker and even then there are some places where they don't keep track A better indicator are of how a series is doing are print numbers but this doesn't come at a regular pace and the conditions of the updates are different (at times they includes worldwide, spin-off, digital, sometimes they don't). If you are interested in seeing print numbers, Okachi.fr does a good job in keeping track of them (in French)
Having said all of that, sales are still sales, Oricon is doing a good job in giving us the data. Even if they are not the perfect indicator of how a series is doing overall (it is not their job to be honest) you can really gauge the popularity of a series, and see how external(and sometimes internal) factors affect the early sales of a volume.
But it is not easy to digest all of those rows of number right? which bring us to my next point.
The Lack of Visual representations of manga sales.
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| Figure 1: An example of a weekly Oricon Sales Chart from ANN[1] |
Oricon might be the most prominent manga sales tracker the community used that actually give out number(Shoseki only give out rankings and estimates) . They started way back in 2008,and the community have been sharing what they've got all the time, so that means we have more than 10 years of data and the best that people had made publicly available are these?
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| Figure 2:Examples of One Piece past sales data from Geocities [2] |
Granted the internet is a huge place and there may be some that others had made that I've missed, so correct me if I am wrong and do link me to them if possible. But basically people don't really like going through row of number which is why the lack of a visual representation doesn't help in propagating discussions.
You might say 10 years of data backlogs is just too tedious to be turned into charts but you can see from Figure 2 above, that for the popular magazine (Jump, Magazine, Sunday) people have been tracking by series and there is even an archive of all the weekly Oricon charts since 2008
The ultimate goal of doing all of this would be creating something similar to this, but with my current capabilities and resources, I am far from achieving even a fraction of this, but I believe this is the right step towards that dream.
I think that is all I have to say on why the chart existed, if it was not obvious from the title of this post, there are still more to come, next I'll be explaining on how exactly to read through a chart, with the minor thing that most don't noticed and some special cases. And I'll explain a bit on the process of how I make these charts
So why is it then, no one is doing the manga charts? When compared to the video game community, ever since the NeoGAF (RIP) and now in ResetERA, the members of community there have been doing a damn good job in giving visuals representation to their weekly sales, granted these are 2 different markets with different trends, comparison and factors, but we don't need a one-to-one translation of them just something that will give the community a better perception of the numbers.
My charts are far far from being perfect, but if I'm the only one who does them, they will never get better. But then again, the charts I've made are a recent thing, so why exactly do I start making them?
A reason to start
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| Figure 3: Arguably one of my favourite chart |
This part is mostly personal and arguably only the people in the Manghelpers WSJ thread gets the inside story, so you can skip to the conclusion below if you feel like it.
Keeping it brief, I've only been active in the (trying not to sound snobbish here) "Meta Manga Community" since December of 2017, since then I've learn a lot about community but having been someone enjoyed lurking in the sales thread of Video Game sales there is always an inkling for me to start making charts of the manga sales. I always have an inclination on how do I contribute back to discussion community (aside from Malaysian-centric articles & the PV stuff) I'm not exactly a creative person to make artworks,videos,or even writing reviews/articles, but I have been a analytical person that likes number, and this is not that far off from what I already do IRL But I lacked the trigger to start making them.
Well that is exactly what happened, someone triggered me on that thread which made argued with that person (I think I was still analytical but I'm not sure) which made me think. "having a chart would make this cut and dry" I don't know if that will cease the argument, but at least I can be assured I had said all that I wanted. and I can completely ignore anything else that person said which were objective wrong (there were argument to be made but they kept bringing up the same exact point).
Figure 4 & 5: related to story above.
So I start making them, and well, some people appreciated them, so at that point I realized these were not irrelevant and that just drive me to make more of them. I really enjoyed making them and I'll be glad if the charts could be of use to anybody.
Conclusion
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| Figure 6: The dream |
The ultimate goal of doing all of this would be creating something similar to this, but with my current capabilities and resources, I am far from achieving even a fraction of this, but I believe this is the right step towards that dream.
I think that is all I have to say on why the chart existed, if it was not obvious from the title of this post, there are still more to come, next I'll be explaining on how exactly to read through a chart, with the minor thing that most don't noticed and some special cases. And I'll explain a bit on the process of how I make these charts
Corrections on anything are welcome!
[1]https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/
[2]http://www.geocities.jp/jump_manga/jump5.htm