polls

A number of readers have expressed interest in seeing the full results of our recent reader survey, so here we are! We’ll talk a bit about what it all means in a moment, but first, the results:

Enough with the graphics! What does it all mean?

A general overview of the survey paints the following picture of the average Manga Bookshelf reader:

You’re most likely to be an adult woman: 90% of our readership is adults over the age of 22 (past college undergraduate age), and 48% are over 30. 65% are women and girls—that’s nearly twice the amount of our male readership.

You buy a lot of manga: Over 75% of our readers report buying between 1-20 volumes of manga a month, with 16% buying more, and just a few reporting that they don’t buy any at all in a typical month. Some readers reported that they borrow most of their manga from the library, or that they tend to buy sporadically, in binges, or mainly at conventions. One reader admitted to reading scanlations because manga isn’t available to buy in her home country (Pakistan).

You’re not yet sold on digital: Digital manga is a sadder tale, with over 60% reporting that none of their purchases is likely to be digital, though the number of digital buyers is still at 35%. Some “other” responses included readers who mainly buy their manga in print but go digital for other comics, and some who said that they don’t buy any now, but had JManga accounts before the site closed. Some are waiting for their favorite out of print manga to turn up digitally.

You’re probably not buying Naruto: In terms of manga demographic categories, shoujo and seinen are readers’ top choices, both beating out shounen manga, which tends to include the mainstream powerhouses (Naruto, Bleach), while categories like josei, boys’ love, and yuri all make strong showings as well. “Other” responses included classic manga, gekiga, “fifth column” and manhwa.

You probably are buying from Vertical: Publisher preferences skew pretty closely to the number of releases, with prolific companies like Viz Media and Yen Press coming out on top. Though it’s notable that Vertical, a relatively small publisher, is heavily patronized by our readership (and actually ranked above Kodansha Comics for quite a while over the course of the poll). One major omission on our part was Drawn & Quarterly, which received a number of “other” mentions, along with a few mentions of companies like PictureBox and Udon, some defunct North American publishers, European publishers like Carlsen and Tokyopop Deutschland, and imports straight from Japan.

It’s probably not surprising that our readership differs significantly from that seen in the recent poll at Comics Should Be Good, at least in terms of gender demographics, given our manga-specific focus and our female-heavy roster of contributors. It perhaps naturally follows that our readers are less hooked on the most mainstream manga series (shounen) than CBR/CSBG’s readers are on the closest western comics equivalent (superheroes), though clearly we’re all slow to take to digital distribution.

Did you miss out on participating in our reader survey? Do you have thoughts about the results? Leave your comments below!

Hello Manga Bookshelf readers!

We watch our page stats pretty closely, and one of the main reasons for this is to try to learn something about how people get to Manga Bookshelf and how easy it is for them to find the content they want once they get here. Historically, the vast majority of our site traffic has come from links accessed offsite, on Twitter, Facebook, and other blogs, or from search engine results—links that usually go directly to an article the individual wants to read. Lately, however, a growing number of readers have been entering the site from the Manga Bookshelf front page. But where they go from that point on has been a little surprising.

As a result, the questions most on my mind are, “Are people finding the content they’re looking for?” and “Have we made that content easy to find?”

You can help me answer these questions by participating in the poll below! Please feel free to use the comment section to elaborate on your experience or what you’d like to see on the Manga Bookshelf front page. I can’t guarantee that we’ll be able to adjust the site to please everyone (certainly an impossible task!) but we will take everyone’s comments into consideration while contemplating our front page layout!

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Elaboration strongly encouraged. (If you don’t tell me what you’re missing, I can’t fix it!)

If there’s anything else you’d like to share, I’d love to hear it! What regular columns are the first ones you look for? Do you come to read a particular writer? What kind of content would you like to see more of?

Thanks for your feedback!

Edited to add: I’ve already made some changes based on comments here, so keep the feedback coming!

Oh, readers, it’s been fairly chaotic behind the scenes at Manga Bookshelf lately, and we’ve fallen behind in so many ways. In the interest of catching up ever so slightly, here are a few links that have piled up over the past few weeks:

To my great delight, ANN recently reported that Kazuya Minekura’s action-packed BL epic Wild Adapter, which has been rerunning from the beginning in Ichijinsha’s Monthly Comic Zero-Sum since sometime last year will be resuming fresh serialization next spring, now that Minekura’s health is back on track. This is particularly big news here at Manga Bookshelf, where some of us (as you may recall) are very big fans.

Moving on from BL to Yuri, JManga is going all out for its new series YuruYuri. From their press release:

In celebration of the release, JManga has released a special “YuruYuri” feature including a character introduction and relationship chart, famous scenes, as well as a special article on Yuri manga by Erica Freidman (Yuricon, ALC Publishing). Additionally, JManga is holding a special quiz contest for YuruYuri fans from August 23rd to 29th (PST). Fans simply need to take the 4 question quiz, and get all the answer right, to be automatically entered into a special drawing for YuruYuri merchandise straight from Japan!

Don’t miss that contest!

At CNN’s “Geek Out!” blog, Danica Davidson discusses why female readers are drawn to manga (spoiler: FEMALE CREATORS), including quotes from people like VIZ’s VP of Publishing, Leyla Aker, and super-librarian Robin Brenner. Definitely a must-read!

Lastly, a quick poll! A while back I’d talked to my fellow Manga Bookshelf bloggers about the possibility of opening up a discussion forum on the site. At the time, everyone agreed that limiting discussion to comment threads on our individual posts helped keep things focused and easy to manage, so I shelved the idea. Just recently, however, I’ve had a request from a reader that we open up a forum here, so I thought I’d bring it to the rest of you for discussion as well. Please note that in any scenario, we would be leaving our posts’ comment threads exactly as-is, rather than moving comments into the forum space, so the forum would exist as a separate entity for discussion.

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My current ideas for what might happen in the forums include: reader reviews (best get promoted to the MB main page), demographic/genre-specific threads, tips for buying manga on the cheap, featured weekly topics, sharing your picspam, ‘shipper’s forums, fanfic recs, and more!

Note: Any discussion forum at Manga Bookshelf would be both fandom-friendly and highly moderated. We are, as always, dedicated to creating a safe space for all.

Please feel free to elaborate or share suggestions in comments! And please vote!