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.)

DMG Titles: Kindle vs. Nook vs DMP App

Big thanks to Boys Love Bang Bang ( @BLBangBang), prettyism, @DefiantAndi from Defiant Endeavors, and azurelucy for contributing pictures of their devices!

First up, the Kindles! I was disappointed by how The Rule of Standing on Tiptoe appeared on my graphite Kindle (top left), but it looked much better on prettyism's Kindle (top right). I have no idea why since they appear to be similar models, but maybe I just need to fiddle with my settings.

a) My older Kindle

b) prettyism's Kindle

c) BLBB's Kindle Fire

d) iPad Kindle App

BLBB's Kindle Fire (bottom left) still has some white space, but the contrast looks pretty good. Considering the price of the Fire, this is a pretty sweet toy. Enjoy, hun! To round things out, I've also included the Kindle iPad App (bottom right). As mentioned in a previous post, there's lots of white space since the files were made for a different sized screen, but the quality is still good.

Without geeking out and getting consistent lighting and scale references and good cameras (I used an iPhone), it looks like the Kindle iPad app and the Fire are pretty comparable. You can zoom in on both, but both BLBB and I agree that there is an unfortunate amount of image compression, and the artifacts make reading small side text difficult. Also, you can't swipe to the next page when you're zoomed in. You have to hit the X to close the zoom window before moving on.

Also, Amazon has rejected an explicit BDSM DMG title, and it's unclear if more titles will be removed in the future. I'll update here as we find out more info.

Next up are the Nooks:

e) Andi's Nook

f) azurelucy's Nook Color (with a regular Nook edition)

g) Rae's Nook Color (with a Nook Color edition)

h) Nook iPad App

They look comparable to their respective Kindle counterparts, but due to circumstances beyond our (and DMG's) control, the Nook file format is higher quality than the Kindle file format. There's no noticeable compression or artifacts, and the files are still negligibly small on broadband (~15 MB).

There are two editions of each book: regular and color. The Color Edition is formatted to fit the dimensions of the larger screen, which is why Rae's DMG title fills the screen and lucy's still has some margin. For the record, BN has not rejected or pulled any DMP titles.

And then there's the DMP app available for iPad and Android tablets:

i) DMP's iPad App

j) DMP's Android App (Samsung Galaxy Tab)

...which is the best quality for the iPad, but books are $1 more than Amazon and BN (see this post). Apple has pulled DMP's more explicit titles from the DMP app in iTunes, but lucky Android owners still have the full library.

For the technologically savvy folks, here's a screenshot from a rooted Sony PRS-T1. The dimensions of the manga match the screen, so this is a good alternative to a Kindle Touch or Nook Touch.

k) azurelucy's Sony PRS-T1 running Aldiko

I'm always on the look out for more pictures of DMG titles on readers and to hear what your experience has been like with digital manga.

Golden Ham Style!!

Who doesn't love Ham-chan?

The Rule Of Standing On Tiptoe - Senobi No Housoku (C) Puku Okuyama. 
All rights reserved. 
Original Japanese edition published in 2011 by Taiyoh Tosho Publishing Co., Ltd.