For the Love of... Mustaches!

During the DMG video conference today (http://www.livestream.com/dmguild), the chat box got a little rowdy. At one point, cheers of "Take off your shirt!" were typed enthusiastically. Near the end, conversation digressed into mustache fetishes, and I nearly suggested a challenge to see who could slip a mustache past DMG QC. I didn't think the head of production would appreciate the humor, though XD

I thought Rikuro looked kind of good with his goatee XD

It didn't go so well for the younger guys, though >_>
Then ago, fu manchu never goes well for anyone...




Top pic is from You and Tonight v1 - Koyoi Omae to (c) by Keiko Kinoshita
Bottom pic is from Rainy Day Love - Ameiro Koigokoro (c) by Satomi Konno
All rights reserved Original Japanese edition published by Taiyoh Tosho Publishing Co., Ltd.

You and Tonight v1 is released!

Volume 1 of You and Tonight by Keiko Kinoshita is finally out on eManga, Kindle, and Nook! This series is still being serialized in HertZ magazine, and hopefully DMG will get the license for volume 2 soon!

Rikuro has been in love with his best friend, Yasutaka, for ten long years. Convinced that he never had a chance, he hid his feelings and moved to Tokyo, dreading the day that Yasutaka will get married and start a family. All that changes at a party one night when Yasutaka admits that he gave in to a desperate co-worker and slept with him. With a renewed sense of determination, Rikuro decides it's time to finally make his move, but his gamble may mean losing his best friend!

Amazon Sales Ranks January 1-15

More colored spaghetti! A few notes:

• Each dot represents a daily average for that book.
• Dots with short line segments or no line at all pop into the top 100 for a day or two and then disappear again. Books with long lines of connected dots stay in the top 100 consistently. 
• Like before, the Manga Rank is Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Comics & Graphic Novels > Manga. It goes up to 100 and is recalculated hourly (by some unknown algorithm).
• The Kindle Rank includes all paid books in the Kindle Store.

• You can see a new title appeared on January 5 in dark purple, and it quickly moved to the top of the rankings. This title had the luxury of being released with only one other book (which isn't included because its link was throwing an error in my script). I'm interested in the next big batch of DMG books and seeing how titles are ranked when several are released at once (as happened around mid-December). Do titles get lost when there are several released at the same time?


• So far, 24 DMG titles have been published. Around 10 titles are consistently staying in the top 1-80 rankings at any given time, and there doesn't seem to be a pattern. Another 10 books fluctuate in and out of the 80-100 range. Is this competition between the books for a limited audience? Or are only half the books garnering word-of-mouth interest?


• Since November, there have been many more Kindle manga books released by other publishing companies like Yaoi Press and Seven Seas. They are regularly less expensive than DMG titles, and Yaoi Press tried something interesting where they published chapters of a book independently. While the total book wound up being more expensive than a DMG title, the first chapter was $1.50 and probably tempted many people to give it a try. What do people think of DMG pricing so far? Too high? Just right?

Ranks aside, I think in the long run we're just going to have to wait until the sales figures come out in a month or two.

Tiptoe Review - Adorable!!

The ladies over at Squeefinity reviewed The Rule of Standing on Tiptoe. Read what they had to say!

Okay, first of all, this is freaking adorable...adorable...like one of the most adorable things I've ever read, so I am going to keep writing adorable over and over again as I review it. ADORABLE! [Read the Rest of the Review]

Amazon Sales Rankings - Let's Do The Numbers!

As they say on Marketplace, "It's time to do the numbers!"

I'm a data geek. I love data. After noticing Amazon's sales rankings a couple weeks ago, I became curious about how those rankings change over time, so I made a script that checks the Amazon page for 21 DMG titles every three hours and then makes a graph of the ranks.

The top graph is the Kindle Manga rank from 0-100 (as high as the ranking goes).

The bottom graph is the Kindle Paid rank with an infinite number of ranks. I capped the graph at 200,000.

One thing I found interesting is that our DMG titles plummeted in Manga Rank the day after Christmas. I don't know if this is because a lot of non-DMG titles were suddenly available or if all the new Kindle owners preferred other manga titles which pushed us out.

I wish I had this script running on December 16 when I took screenshots of 15 DMG titles in the Manga Top 20. By December 19, when this started recording, most of the books had already dropped to the 20-60 range.

TO OTHER DMGers: If you would like to see this graph but with a legend showing which colors are your books, let me know here or send me a message on Twitter. I kept the titles anonymous on purpose, but if you give me permission I will identify them in the spaghetti mess above. I can probably post bi-monthly or monthly updates so you can track your Amazon sales.

The Rule of Standing on Tiptoe - Review by Manga Bookshelf!

Check out what Manga Bookshelf had to say about the Rule of Standing on Tiptoe!

Having enjoyed Okuyama’s short story collection Warning! Whispers of Love, I was eager to try The Rule of Standing on Tiptoe, a volume-long one-shot nicely translated/adapted by the DMG group Cynical Pink. [read the full review]

DMG Dominates :D

15 of the top 20 Kindle Manga books are from Digital Manga Publishing, and 13 of those are DMG titles! Way to go, guys!

(Click to view in light box.)