< Continued from page 1

Q: As a josei manga title about a young mother and her experiences raising her autistic son, With The Light is obviously a book that has to be marketed quite differently than other manga titles....

KH: Absolutely. It's a matter of reaching out to audiences who aren't necessarily looking for manga. You have to put it in front of people who are looking for books about autism, about kids with special needs, and that's a whole different audience than what the usual manga publisher is going for.


I have a lot of experience in that segment, after buying self-help books for Borders for quite a while. While I did that, I dealt with books with autism, so it was a natural transition to take that experience and apply it to this book.

Q: That's very interesting, because I'd say right now, there's a very narrow definition of what manga is, that it's only for teens, that it's only shojo or shonen type comics. However, anyone who's been to a manga store in Japan or even Japanese bookstores here in the U.S. can see that the manga selection is huge, that there's manga about everything!

KH: Yep, any subject under the sun!

Q: So do you plan on putting out more "unconventional" manga like that?

KH: Sure, absolutely, if the opportunity presents itself. Rich is always fond of saying that if it's a good book, we'll publish it. We're not open to taking on all sorts of titles. If we feel like we can do it justice and find an audience for it, we're absolutely interested.

Q: Speaking of Rich, by the way, when I read the press on Yen Press, I notice that a lot of the focus is on you. Can you share a little bit about what Rich brings to the Yen Press equation?

KH: Oh sure. Rich, we've known each other for years. When I first started working in this category, Rich was really the only guy who was out there schlepping comics into the mainstream bookstores. He was the face of comics to mainstream publishing for a long time.

If you talk to librarians, Rich is the one who made comics acceptable to libraries. So he brings to the table massive experience with the comics business, great connections with all the bookstore accounts, all of the libraries. He just has a wealth of knowledge and he's earned a lot of goodwill from throughout the industry. I think Heidi MacDonald (columnist for The Beat, a comics blog from Publisher's Weekly) described Rich as "the most loved man in comics."

Q: Wow, love and power – what a combination!

KH: (laughs) Well, I'm definitely not in the "love" part of the equation!

Q: So I wanted to ask about Yen Press' relationship with your parent company, Hachette. Besides being a major publisher of several categories of books in the U.S. and Europe, Hachette also has a French manga publishing division,Pika Édition, yes?

KH: Yes, earlier this year that deal came through. Not too long after we started up Yen, actually.

Q: So what made Hachette feel like now was a good time to expand its investment in manga publishing in North America and Europe?

KH: This has been the booming area of the publishing business for years. If you look at the category, there is no other category that has this kind of sustained growth any where else in publishing. Book sales are up in general, but it's just unbelievable when you look at the kind of growth taking place in graphic novels across the board since 2000.

Obviously, Hachette, like every other mainstream publisher was trying to figure out the best way to get into this industry, and I think they went about it pretty intelligently. They knew that it was a category that they didn't know much about, as far as in-house expertise, so they went out and found partners who really know this market very well. And rather than get into this market in a small way, they made a really big splash with it.

Q: Boy, I'll say. I just went through the last year of press releases regarding Yen Press, and it's huge amount of announcements and additions to your line right off the bat. The Square Enix deal, the co-publishing in the UK… (e.g. releasing Yen Press manga titles in the UK at the same time as the North American releases, not a typical practice with other U.S. publishers.)

KH: I'm actually very excited about the co-publishing in the UK, because that's a market that hasn't gotten the attention it should be getting.

Q: So what went into the decision to do things this way?

KH: Well, if you look at the UK market, it's somewhat challenged. Manga is licensed out by territories. UK is treated as a separate territory, which is how it should be, but at the same time, you're dealing with English language translations of these books. So the minute that it is available in an English language edition, the fans want it. Fans don't care about which territory the book is licensed to – they just want to read the book in English.

So knowing that this is a problem and seeing other publishers struggle with it, we really wanted to address it at the outset in a way that no other publisher has done.

So we felt like it was a natural transition to take that relationship and launch Yen Press in the UK market. I'm working closely with George Watley, this great guy in the UK to oversee the launch there. It's actually funny, because he used to be a graphic novel bookstore buyer as well.

COMING ATTRACTIONS: MANGA, MANHWA AND MAGAZINES

Q: Another new project that has a lot of buzz surrounding it your upcoming manga anthology magazine. Will it be a monthly magazine?

KH: Yes, that is the plan.

Q: And what types of titles will be included? Shonen? Shojo? Seinen? Josei?

KH: We're targeting this to the US market, and the US market is not big enough to approach it like you would in the Japanese market. The Japanese market is so huge and well-developed, so it makes total sense to target a magazine to a specific demographic.

But when you're looking at a nascent market like the US, where so much of the readership crosses over to read books targeting different demographics, then you really have to take a broader perspective on it. So we're really not looking to limit it like, 'this is a boys magazine' or 'this is a girls magazine' – this is a magazine for anyone interested in manga.
(More on Page 3)