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While the price of things like comics and manga might seem arbitrarily picked, there is a lot of science that goes into finding the right price for these items. Part of that is playing off how people perceive differences in numbers. As one manga expert explains, most people won’t notice a jump of a few dollars when buying a manga like Naruto.

During a recent interview, Dallas Middaugh, a manga industry veteran with more than 20 years in the business including senior stints at VIZ Media, Seven Seas Publishing, Del Rey, Penguin Random House, and Crunchyroll, explained that the price of manga usually involves a little bit of playing off of people’s expectations. In the early 2000s, when VIZ was struggling to get into book stores, they tried to reduce the price of titles like Naruto to entice customers. The problem was that the move was costing them money for no real increase in sales.

“Look at what happened with the Shonen Jump stuff,” Middaugh explained. “They brought it down, in fact, to $8, even though the buyers were arguing against that because the reader’s perception of the price of a book being $8, $7.99 versus $9.99. The reader doesn’t perceive that as being a big difference. Sure, $4.99 versus $9.99, absolutely, but at an $8 to $10 ratio, it wasn’t. They stuck with that for two or three years. When they finally shifted the prices up to $9.99, sales stayed exactly the same.”

The psychology of pricing is fascinating because it is often all about figuring out not just what a product is worth, but how much you can change the price of something before they notice. Just how much are fans willing to pay for a volume of Naruto, after all?

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

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