Hello everyone!

The most frequent question we're getting right now is if we’re reprinting books that are showing out of stock on retail sites, and the answer is yes! Eventually. Here’s a little background on what exactly is going on and why.

Because of the pandemic, many people are unable to leave their homes to do things and also to spend money, which has caused the manga market (along with other entertainment industries) to explode. Normally, this would be great news, and it is…to a point. The problem is that it happened so fast that the manga printers simply couldn’t handle the larger-than-usual print runs for new books while also taking on a crazy number of reprint orders (don’t forget that they also have to deal with their own pandemic issues, like staffing problems). I'm not even going to get into shipping issues caused by Brexit, the Suez Canal and other shipping route blockages, and port backups.

In addition, there are only so many manga printers, and because of that, we all tend to use the same ones, so when one publisher is having a problem like this, we all are. With reprints, we have to slot them in to the printer’s schedule, not just our own. And since they handle more than manga, we’re competing for print slots with many other books, including high selling prose titles and other new releases. The reality is that we simply can’t reprint everything as it needs it or at the quantities that we'd like, which means we have to select what gets reprinted now and what simply has to wait. On-going newer series like Given and Yarichin Bitch Club are in continuous reprint because they sellout almost immediately, as you've seen, but older, completed series will take much longer to reprint, so although our intent is to continue to reprint our out-of-stock books, if it’s an older title, it won’t be back in stock for some time yet (there's always digital!). 

My advice to everyone is to not wait on grabbing our new releases, and if something you want is available right now, grab it! :D This is also a great time to stock up on those older titles you still need as those are more likely to be in stock. Good luck and happy hunting!