Richardson Handjaja, publisher and editor of weekly anime and manga business newsletter Animenomics, has reported on anime and manga from the United States and Southeast Asia for the last eleven years. He was the first news managing editor at MyAnimeList, the world’s largest anime and manga community website. In his second annual Manga Week column for ICv2, he explains how recent manga publishing trends in Japan can drive strategies in the U.S.
Data on Japan’s publishing market show that domestic manga sales fell almost 2 percent in 2025 to ¥693 billion (US$4.45 billion), making it the first time in eight years that the country’s manga market has shrunk. Growth in digital manga, which makes up three-quarters of the total market, has slowed to the point where it can no longer reliably offset tumbling print manga sales.
Digital manga’s slowdown quickened as the year progressed. During the first six months of the year, digital manga sales grew at an annual rate of 4.6 percent, according to data compiled by the Research Institute for Publications, an arm of the All Japan Magazine and Book Publishers and Editors Association. In the second half of the year, however, that growth rate slumped to just 1.5 percent.
Full year sales of print manga volumes fell more than 14 percent, and manga magazines fell almost 13 percent. Popular titles like My Hero Academia, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Oshi no Ko ended publication in 2024, and the market struggled in the absence of successors with the same scale of buzz. In the United States, My Hero Academia ended publication in October, Jujutsu Kaisen will end this May, and Oshi no Ko will likely end by early 2027. After that, U.S. sales could follow a similar trajectory as Japan.
Falling sales revenue does not imply that Japan is publishing fewer manga. In fact, publishers released more than 16,000 new manga volumes last year, which is 6.5 percent more releases than in 2024. That is the largest annual increase since around 2008.
Kadokawa, Japan’s third-largest manga publisher, aptly summarized these opposing trends in its quarterly earnings results presentation this month: “Although the number of new [publications] has increased steadily, the scale of sales per title has shrunk.” In 2025, new manga volume releases from Kadokawa were up by more than 13 percent, but total sales from print and digital manga fell by about 10 percent, mirroring the trajectory of the broader market.
Increasing the number of releases is costly for publishers, especially as they hire new editors to work with authors and artists and as the price of printing materials increases. Combined with shrinking sales, the growing cost of manga publishing puts pressure on publishers’ profits, pushing them toward adaptations of manga into other media.
This shift is evident among Japan’s digital-first publishers, like AlphaPolis. These publishers acquire user-generated web novels and publish them in the light novel format. They also rode the digital manga surge of the last ten years and adapted many of their titles into manga. But with the growth in digital manga ending, they must search for new revenues elsewhere.
For AlphaPolis, its future lies in anime adaptations. Thanks to early investments, the last ten straight quarters have seen at least one anime airing based on an AlphaPolis title. Last July, AlphaPolis acquired the anime production studio that animated the popular isekai fantasy series Re:Zero – Starting Life in Another World—a Kadokawa title. The acquisition will likely add to AlphaPolis’s know-how of creating successful anime adaptations of isekai fantasy titles.
Additionally, given that anime drives manga sales outside Japan, AlphaPolis is moving forward with plans to publish some titles from its English-language digital manga platform Alpha Manga in print starting June 2026.
Other digital-first publishers are following suit. TO Books, which was added to the Tokyo Stock Exchange this month, also plans to increase investment in anime productions and to introduce more of its manga titles to North America.
“North America has a rapidly growing manga market, and more companies are launching digital manga platforms. We want to consider models for collaborating with such companies,” TO Books president Takeichi Honda told Japanese media this month.
Source: ICv2
