Anime Book (A Bit of Market Research)

Ian Wolf

Mushi-shi
AUKN Staff
I thought it would be safest to post this in this threat. If the admin want to move it elsewhere or remove it totally let me know.

I am thinking of trying to use crowdfunding to publish a book, but wanted to get some opinions on the matter and decide if it was worth doing or not. The book in question is a collection of articles I have written for the website On The Box. I write The Beginner's Guide to Anime column for it, in which I take a different anime series or film every week and explain to non-anime fans what it is about, its merit (or lack or merit) and so on. I was planning to publish a book of the first 100 articles, revised and expanded for their original publication, which would be written by April, and I would plan to have the book printed by June.

My target would be £2,200 - this would cover the cost of printing, the design of the front cover, proofreading, and the fees on Kickstarter, where I plan to launch the project. This would print 200 books.

The main questions I wanted to ask were these:

1) Would be people be interested in a print volume, an e-book, both or neither?
2) If people are interested in funding it, how much would they be willing to pay?
3) What sort of perks would people want? Name in the back of the book? Signed copies? Nominate anime for me to cover in later columns? Presenting panels at conventions? Something totally different? And how much would people be willing to pay for such perks?

Please tell me what you really think. If you think I'm wasting my time with such a project let me know so I can do something else. If you have any other ideas do tell me.
 
Having just read through a few of your articles, I'm not a sure a print book is the best way to go - have you thought about releasing them through Amazon as ebooks?

To me, the articles just feel a bit too light to be worth (and I don't mean any offence by this) all the effort of creating a physical book for. Some of them aren't much more than synopses of the series...
 
My gut reaction would say, do this as an e-book, and put it on Amazon. I've seen journalists etc. in the music/media industry do this quite frequently and they usually seem to get a pretty good reaction - if you tag your book well so it appears relatively high up in terms of searches for 'anime' etc. in Amazon's e-books section, it could do quite nicely, especially if it's priced attractively. That way, you eliminate the overheads and risks that come with doing a physical book too.
 
Ian Wolf said:
Thanks. What would you suggest would be a decent price?

I'd say somewhere between £2.99 and £5.99 - by keeping the price lowish you'll probably more likely tempt impulse buys.
 
Don't know, but maybe publishing it on Apple iBooks is also an option ? But i think iBooks Author to make the book is only available on the OS X platform. But iBooks actually uses ePub as it's major format, so that shouldn't be a problem, to find another application to author the book.

Anime Classics Zettai! seems to be a similar book to what you're aiming for ?
 
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