Fun With Numbers: First-Week Sales Rough Guesses for June 2014 R1 Releases

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Since February, I’ve made it a habit to track R1 anime releases on US Amazon, hoping to get an idea of how sales figures look for specific US series. I recently finished up taking data for the month of June (available here).

Recently, that study seems to have begun bearing fruit. Combined with assumptions about the positions of their blu-ray top 20 versus the overall top 20, I was able to come up with a power law approximating how much a day ranking on US Amazon was worth in terms of disks sold per day (#=300,000/rank). Recently, I got my first substantial bit of proof that this prediction method was at least somewhat viable (to within +/-20%), and I’m at the point where I’m ready to put out very basic estimates of what first-week sales figures for various releases should look like for those series released in June.

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Fun With Numbers: Print Boosts’ Effect on Sequel Odds

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It’s been well-established that an anime adaptation of a manga or light novel can be a huge boon to the source material. What’s a bit less obvious is whether or not boosting print material can fuel the production of a second season of said anime.There are at least a few reasons why it shouldn’t; for a manga get adaptation boosts primarily from the first season – afterwards, their sales tend to plateau or drop off (even if the series does get a second season). It makes sense on an intuitive level that there would be some sort of diminishing returns on subsequent seasons of anime; sequels tend to sell between 0% and 50% fewer disks, and people don’t tend to start watching anime from the second season onward. But whether or not those diminishing returns carry over to print sales, and if so to what extent, is a somewhat separate question.

In this post, I’ll be exploring that question, comparing the rate of shows getting sequels with and without print sales boosts over different ranges of disk sales, to get an idea of whether or not print sales boosts actually “matter” towards a show’s sequel odds.*

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Via Anime Insider: Mangaka’s Taxes (August 2005)

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A short article on the most-taxed mangaka (a list topped in 2005 by Rumiko Takahashi). There are probably more recent lists that would be likewise interesting to see and almost certainly include Oda Eiichiro, though I couldn’t find them with a casual google.

Also available here.

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Via Anime Insider: Howl’s Moving Castle Dub Voices (August 2005)

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An interview with the two dub voices of Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle, talking about how the role was recorded. They had actually never met before this interview, so apparently there was very little interaction between the actors in general (probably a consequence of using more-booked celebrities).

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Fun With Numbers: Two-Week Revisions of the 2011-2012 Manga Adaptation Data

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This post took long enough to put together as it is, so I’m dispensing with the intro.

2011 data

2012 data

Read this for why I redid the existing 2011 and 2012 plots. New plots are after the jump, but first, a quick summary of the major changes:

-Whether or not Zetman and Thermae Romae got significant boosts is more dubious.

-On the other hand, Maken-ki, Deadman Wonderland, Hyougemono, Brave 10, Joshiraku, Sankarea, Acchi Kocchi, Squid Girl, and Yuruyuri all look like more probable boost recipients than before.

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