This past Saturday Kinokuniya and Vertical Inc held a Knights of Sidonia event, which turned out to preview the first episode of the Sidonia anime on Netflix, some brief talk on Vertical’s involvement with the anime staff, and a Q & A which revealed the anime was doing well on Netflix. After the event, Ed Chavez, who you know is heavily involved with the manga side of Vertical (and hosted the event), had some time after the event to talk more about Sidonia and its success. I did ask one question that did not pertain to Sidonia though…and it involved a tweet.
HNNNN!!! Will we have to do a reprint of Attack on Titan: Before the Fall even before it goes on sale?!!
— Vertical, Inc. (@Vertical_Ed) August 5, 2014
Organization ASG: Before we get into Knights of Sidonia, I wanted to ask about Attack on Titan: Before the Fall. You had tweeted that you might have to order more books on it? So now I’m curious about how’s it doing, what were your expectations about it coming in, and what’s your expectations on it now?
Ed Chavez: Yeah, so we’re going to be releasing Attack on Titan: Before The Fall…I won’t say it’s a spin off but it’s…not the prequel to the original Attack on Titan manga. It’s a light novel, 3 parts, but the one volume that we’re currently planned to release is a prequel to even what Kodansha has released, they’ve also released a manga called Before The Fall so this like essentially the origin story for all the technology, the actual walls that are built up, it’s the first time you actually get to experience any of the titans and we came in with…pretty reasonable expectations. We knew Titan has been a very successful property in the states, and also one of the more successful titles to debut in the last 4-5 years or so, but we were also a little uncertain about how people were going to respond to a light novel because LN’s in general not been that successful here in the states. There have been a couple of exceptions but most of them have not hit the expectations that people had in the past.
So we were thinking, ok, let’s make some modest numbers for this, print out x amount of copies, and actually those figures were a lot larger than we’ve done for any novel — mind you Vertical releases a lot of novels, that’s actually like a good chunk of our business, they don’t sell extremely well outside of a few properties — but what we printed for titan is possibly 4 or 5 times what we normally do for a novel, under even our best sixth senses. The book hasn’t gone on sale yet, it goes on sale next month…we’ve already gone to reprint *laughs* which is kind of shocking in a way! So demand, at least for the retailers and pre-orders, has been really high. We’ll see how that actually pans out when books are in people’s hands and in stores, but what we’re seeing right now we have not seen for a novel since we released the Ring series, which, literally, ten years.
So expectations have changed quite a bit for that, and with that in mind, we might be doing more novels and more light novels in the future, but nothing is concrete at this time, just a little re-evaluation of how things are going and stuff.
OASG: What went into the thought process of doing a Knights of Sidonia event at this time? Did you see numbers that suggested this would get a good turnout, was this already in the works or planned earlier this year?
Ed: Honestly we’ve been doing a little Knights of Sidonia things since May. We helped coordinate Angela’s appearance at Anime Central, we had our booth right next to them so we were doing autograph sessions and at Anime Expo we did things with Angela as well — not as active because they were placed on a different part of the floor — but we were also having people buy copies of the book, get discounts for autographs, session tickets and all that.
With that in mind, for this specific event we were actually approached by Kinokuniya. Brought up in the event itself, sales and interest for the series kind of got revitalized and in some ways exceeded what they were previously after the animation debuted. I think a lot of vendors, whether it’d be Kinokuniya, Barnes &Noble, Diamond, very quickly saw that there was not just renewed interest, but just an interest in general for the title, so in this case John Fuller, the manager here at Kinokuniya contacted us within about two weeks after the anime debuted because he was starting to see a lot of movement for those books in store. So a few times a year they do events they haven’t done as many anime events, that’s why I think they did a Titan event half a year ago, he was very curious if we would be interested in doing something specifically on Knights of Sidonia. Previously we just did things that were a little broader here, like we used to have a monthly book club meeting here at Kinokuniya, but once we moved our offices to a different location — we were two blocks away previously – it hasn’t been as conducive, so it was really nice to go back and see not just familiar faces but new faces here. I hope it turned out ok for Kinokuniya as well. That pile of books (as you see in the picture) didn’t really move as much as I think we might have expected *laughs*
OASG: While during the talk about Knights of Sidonia you mentioned how Vertical was working closely with the animation companies in Japan. Can you elaborate on that?
Well in our case it’s really unique because the former Vertical Director is currently an executive at King Records so there’s a very close familiarity between the two companies. Honestly when it came to production we didn’t really work that closely on things outside of some marketing, and obviously the script. We were contacted in November 2013 as King Records and KOS were in process of producing the actual episodes and at that point, oh God I don’t know if it’s been made public yet, but we were informed that there was going to be an English dub and sub of it. We weren’t at first told who, we very quickly, like maybe two or three weeks or a month or so we were finally informed of who was going to be distributing it, but they asked us to provide many details about new technology in the series, character spellings, tone, there’s a lot of little elements and we tried to make the process for them consistent. A few things were changed, and it’s not exclusive to the subtitles or dub, even the Japanese script, even in some cases were slightly altered from what it was in the comic, but obviously adaptations aren’t always 100% analog straight so things are always going to be a little bit different and we weren’t consulted about those things, it was all done on the JP side but that’s the end result like that’s okay it’s pretty acceptable. There were a couple of lines that I would be like, “Huh?” but that’s not up to us really.
OASG: Were you surprised with the Knights of Sidonia anime going on Netflix and how that’s helped you guys out with manga sales on the actual series?
Ed: Not too much really. Um, well we didn’t know exactly at the time when we bid on the series that there was going to be an anime. We kind of had a feeling that it would be very conducive to being adapted, so we were keeping our fingers crossed that that would occur because we, from a very early point were like, “Man if this was available in some other form of media people would really gravitate towards it.” Sidonia was very good for the first year, or first 5 or 6 volumes. As series get longer and longer it becomes a little bit of a concern, that’s the case for almost everything that’s not an immediate hit. But once we knew that there was going to be an animation for it, we were just like, “Well, let’s just wait this out.” We didn’t have any issue about whether we was going to cancel it or anything, we were like “let’s just wait this out to see what our print runs are gonna be like.”
So what was very interesting for Sidonia is that even though, under normal circumstances after X amount of time and X amount of volumes, we knew where our print runs because sales had just kind of declined for almost everything. In the case of Sidonia we didn’t do that. We’re just gonna print this much out and just wait it out until the anime comes out…and we were totally right! And actually, we underestimated because when the animation came out — like we saw a bit of bump from the fansubs — but once it was available in English and on Netflix, like the stock was just gone. It was almost instantaneous. Our warehouses were just done. And as I’ve said before, we were planning on this, we knew this would happen, but we didn’t expect it to be that crazy. And it wasn’t from just one vendor, like all of a sudden these vendors were like, “Ok, we’re gonna lower our numbers because now we’ve released 9 volumes, we know how many units people are buying, we’ll just place re-orders later,” now they’re just like, “We need stock now! We need thousands of copies right now!” And we’re just like, “We can print more!” *laughs* you can buy what we’ve got! But you’re not gonna get them all immediately,” they’re just like, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” So it was a surprise. It was a pleasant surprise. And knowing that there’s going to be more volumes and there’s a whole other season is all falling into place. We knew about the 2nd season after we submitted the script suggestions, and that was around December or January.
OASG: Why do think people have taken to Knights of Sidonia like this? What characteristics do you believe that has made it take off like it has recently?
I think there are a number of points. There hasn’t really been too much Sci-Fi that is Sci-Fi for its own sake. Sidonia’s kind of like that in many ways. It’s got weird settings, weird characters, and a lot of these concepts aren’t “new” but they’re fresh again? These are ideas that have just been ignored for a while, and playing with them in ways are refreshing for those who like Science Fiction. I think there’s a good audience for that, a very active one, but unfortunately it hasn’t been served very well recently. The reason I say that is we went to San Diego Comic Con, that’s not necessarily a manga type of community, but we were getting a lot of attention from people who saw it on Netflix and were just like, “this is really good Science Fiction, you need to check it out, this is really weird, like The Fifth Element kind of weird stuff.” They were also like, “It’s got robots, all this other stuff, like crazy settings,” so that kind of made us think that this is a title that could be approached not just for anime and manga fans, but there are other people who can look at it and take it in and make it much more broader than what most anime tends to be, especially things that have been trending recently in anime — rom-coms, moe, stuff like that.
So for us, we knew that if there was an anime, the fandom would be interested in it. Would every single anime fan pick it up? Absolutely not, they might have an opportunity to sample it if it’s going to be available. But what was a surprise for us was that crossing over, and I think Netflix being such a big platform and them also marketing it in a…a little disingenuous, they didn’t actually produce the thing, it’s not really their work, but they did localize it, but that also helped, that helped get it written up in places like Variety and actual places where you don’t see anime — especially TV anime — brought up unless it’s already been big, like after Titan was huge, or if you’re a movie director, or if you’re Miyazaki, Variety’s gonna write about it. Or if you’re Hosoda or Shinkai and you’re in the states doing an event at like Lincoln Center or something they’ll write about you and people start to pay attention. But when does the mainstream ever look at the subculture? Not really. But this was unique and that’s mainly because of Netflix.
OASG: How do you see the future of Knights of Sidonia from the manga side, considering the manga’s still ongoing and normally Vertical doesn’t publish too long for one series, so how’s that gonna shape out?
Ed: It’s interesting. Like we knew going in, after talking to editors and stuff like that in Japan, that this was going to be around 10-12 volumes or so. But success often changes things, and in this case, we have no idea how long the series is gonna be now. It’s at Volume 13, and I’ll be totally frank with you that if you read the comic, there will be points where you think, “maybe it could’ve ended here!” I kind of feel that may have come and gone so is there going to be another 10 volumes run? Maybe. Can Sidonia get another season? Maybe! I don’t know! It’s done quite well. We’re already kind of in the process of considering what we’re doing with the work now that the anime has brought it’s own success and we we’re quite aware of the fact that things are going to be coming down in the Fall and coming months, so we’re going to continue to work on what we have — we have another 6 or 7 months of untranslated stuff to work on — and we’re just gonna kind of see how it goes from there. We don’t expect things to drop off too much, especially once there’s going to be basically a reboot in the visual content, that’s something that we kind of look forward to right now. We’re really excited about what’s going to be happening in the down time.
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Justin
Justin is the founder of Organization Anti-Social Geniuses. Anime & manga fan that likes to blog about anime and manga, is addicted to sports, and weak to crossovers. You can follow Justin on Twitter @Kami_nomi.Latest posts by Justin (see all)
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