Central Park Media Rebounds

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on October 31, 2006 Sign up now!

by Calvin Reid, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 10/31/2006

Central Park Media is back. After a companywide restructuring following the bankruptcy filings of two of its national retail outlets, the New York City independent anime distributor and manga publisher has rebounded with a new publishing schedule, new book distribution and new hires on its staff.

Faced with the loss of the Musicland chain (in late 2005), which represented 30% of its DVD sales, and the Tower Record chain in summer of 2006, the company was forced to restructure quickly. “We opened the year with high hopes,” says John O’Donnell, “but we got blindsided by the Musicland bankruptcy. In May we faced a financial crunch. It snowballed from there and made life miserable for our staff.” O’Donnell says that meant layoffs (some staff was laid off and others switched from full to part-time) and cost cutting that included everything from cutting back its publishing list to moving to cheaper office space.

O’Donnell says CPM sales are lower today but so are his costs, and the house has been “cash positive” since the end of the summer. He says CPM vendors, printers Quebecois and Triplex, and DVD replicators Cav and Expedia “stood by us.” But the vendors couldn’t extend the house more credit, and “we had to cut back on dubbing, printing and translations,” says O’Donnell. CPM has moved into new office space on a higher floor in its current buildingon 57^th Street in New York. CPM also limited convention appearances and other marketing events, which, unfortunately, fed rumors about the company’s financial status. But O’Donnell is quick to point out, “We didn’t file for bankruptcy, Musicland did. But unsubstantiated rumors exacerbated our problems.”

The company returned to the convention scene at the recent yaoi-con with a list of 15 manga titles (all yaoi) and two Korean manhwa titles that it will publish between fall 2006 and summer 2007. Look for new volumes from yaoi authors Kazuma Kodaka and Youka Nitta. O’Donnell says the house will likely “add stuff as we go along” in the second quarter. “We’ve got hundreds of licenses bought and paid for that we had to put on hold,” says O’Donnell. A move to Consortium Distribution announced at this year’s BookExpo—put on hold because of the financial crunch—is back on track. CPM is moving its inventory into the Consortium warehouse, and O’Donnell says the distributor will begin servicing its accounts in the next few weeks.

O’Donnell has managed to rehire some of the laid-off staff—CPM creative director Mike Lackey recently rejoined the company—and hired new personnel. Valerie Ho, a production associate, and D.J. Stutzman, a graphic designer, have also joined the CPM manga staff. CPM is back to 15 full-time staffers, 5 part-timers and maintains a small office in Tokyo.

O’Donnell is emphatic that “the manga and anime market is fine. We’re publishing a lot of yaoi first because that’s where the buzz in the marketplace is.” Initial publishing will continue the yaoi series that had already started. He compares today’s hot manga market to the development of the anime market, noting with dismay the fast rise in the number of titles. “Everyone with a book with big-eyed characters is jumping in the market trying to play the market share game,” he says. “They don’t care if they’re losing money. It’s ‘whoever publishes the most titles wins.’ We can’t compete with that. We don’t have a parent company we can go to for more money. We live and die by our business sense.”

But he also credits smaller houses like CPM and Digital Manga, and new firms like DramaQueen, with taking the risks needed to build the burgeoning yaoi market: “Look how many new people are publishing yaoi now, both translated and original titles. It’s selling and some stores won’t even carry it.”

“We took some heavy punches,” says O’Donnell about the recent restructuring. “It’s like we went through emergency surgery. We’ve been rehabbing and now we’re walking around again. We hung in there and made the changes that were necessary for us to survive.”

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