The folks at Kodansha Comics have been kicking some serious butt over on their official Tumblr blog as they reach out to the audience there since March. A lot of what they get are questions about “can you release this”, which is par for the course for just about any manga publisher in North America when interacting with fans. Luckily, the folks at Kodansha Comics have made it easy (particularly due to having a very human person running the blog, making it highly friendly and accessible) and they’ve come up with the basic way to ask them about acquiring new manga licenses. As they mention below, every publisher has different ways of handling it. But because Kodansha has been so forthright in it, and they have such an interesting library of titles, we wanted to share that post here since we often get similar questions:
How should fans approach English publishers with license suggestions?
First, learn which Japanese publishers publish the series you want to suggest, because pretty much every English publisher has different requirements. For instance, we can only publish Kodansha manga. Any Shogakukan or Shueisha titles are probably only available to Viz. Seven Seas has other requirements. Vertical, Inc. has different requirements. Yen Press has a close relationship with Square Enix, so they’re the ones to go to with Square Enix manga, and so on. A good way to see if a series is good for a particular English publisher is to see if they’ve published any manga by that Japanese publisher in the past. Or, you could always ask them!How do you find out which series belong to which Japanese publishers?
This can get a little tricky, but it’s still pretty easy once you know how to do it. Many unlicensed series have pages on Wikipedia, and those pages normally list the Japanese publisher. If you can’t find a page for the series itself, normally one of the suggested pages will be for the magazine it runs in. Most of the magazines at least have pages, and those always list the Japanese publisher.If Wikipedia’s not helping, my next resort is MyAnimeList. They don’t list the publisher, but they doalmost always list the magazine. After that it’s back to Wikipedia to look up the magazine! If for some reason they don’t list the magazine, my next step is to grab the Japanese name and search Amazon Japan. You see the section that says “出版社”? That says “Publisher.” The kanji to the right of that is what you need. For people who can’t read Japanese, you can input that into Google Translate. (For reference, Kodansha is 講談社)
(That all seems kinda complicated when I’ve written it all out, but I promise it’s relatively painless! ^_^; It’s very valuable information when you’re suggesting licenses.)
When should I suggest new licenses to English publishers?
This depends on the publisher. We take license suggestions all year round, but other publishers may only open up suggestions at certain points in the year. Follow them on social media (Facebook/Twitter/tumblr if they have it!) to find out when these things happen. Some of them run polls to help them decide, some of them just take a general survey. (Personally what I do is tag EVERYTHING suggested on here and use that to help determine which suggestions are the most popular) (Though popularity is definitely not the only thing that determines if we pursue a title or not.) If you can conduct a fan survey with a large audience, that sounds great! I would definitely be interested in learning the results.To sum up, if you’d like to suggest series to English publishers
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Learn which Japanese publishers each English publisher has access to. Only suggest series that are possible for that publisher. This means your lists of license suggestions should be customized for each English publisher.
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Wait for them to ask for license suggestions, or politely suggest them if they seem open to that. If you have hard data to back up your suggestions, mention that!
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Understand that English publishers will not be able to publish everything, and that popularity is not the only factor we need to consider.