Print sales of manga and digital grew by 9% in 2022, primarily due to customers shopping in bookstores. This is very solid growth but pales in comparison to the 134% manga growth rate in 2021, and the 30% growth rate in 2020.
Manga sales in comic stores, a much smaller channel for manga than the book channel, grew faster in 2022, at a 12.5% rate. This flips a trend from 2021 when the book channel grew at a 137% rate and the comic store channel doubled.
“Manga sales had another record year in 2022, after a blockbuster 2021,” ICv2 Publisher Milton Griepp said in a statement accompanying the announcement. “With manga as the largest graphic novel category, it’s more critical than ever for the trade to gain the insights it needs to take advantage of the huge opportunities it represents.”
NPD BookScan, which collects data from the book channel, and ComicHub, a comic store point-of-sale system just reported on the top 20 best-selling manga of the year for 2022. This gives us a sense of what people are buying in comic stores and bookstores, such as Barnes and Noble.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
