On Rocket Bomber there's a weekly list ranking sales for the top 500 manga. I trust this ranking to be accurate despite knowing nothing about the author because: A. verifying the accuracy is impossible due to my limited time, and B. assuming that it's accurate grants me a free database of useful information.
Yaoi Press usually has at least one title in the top 500. This week Yaoi Hentai Vol. 2 is #380, down from 349 last week.
I didn't understand why a title published over two years ago had consistently higher online sales than all our newer titles. It's true that the words 'Yaoi' and more importantly 'Hentai' are in the title, thereby making the series pop up on numerous searches, however, why doesn't this drive sales of Yaoi Hentai 3, or 1, or 4?
I've traced the answer to Google Book Search. If you search for the word 'hentai,' Yaoi Hentai 2 is the first title that comes up. I had an old assistant of mine get Yaoi Press in this program around the end of 2006. All our titles printed prior to November 2006 are in the program. I looked at this week's report from Google:
Top Books (2008-07-13 ~ 2008-07-19)
Top 5 Books by Book View Book Visits
Winter Demon Volume 1 24
Yaoi Hentai Volume 2 225
Stallion 17
Saihoshi The Guardian 11
Desire of the Gods 7
When you view a Yaoi Press title through their system you're given three links to buy the book. The first is Yaoi Press, then Amazon.com, then Barnes&Noble.com.
I've had the rest of our titles sent to Google for inclusion. It's nice to see a program that was free to participate in driving online sales. It's also nice to see that having the word 'hentai' in a book title is finally paying the search engine dividends I had hoped for when the series was first named. Perhaps instead of 'Happy Yaoi Yum Yum,' our new hentai series should have been called 'iPhone TMZ Viagra.'
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