With the eventual prevalence of Manga and Anime around the world, we cannot deny its inevitable increase in sales. There are numerous factors as to why the popularity and increase of manga sales have been significant. Talking a little bit of history, it is commonly known that the medium of manga was not that known and popular when anime started to become popular overseas. However, the audience is gradually being introduced to other mediums of Japanese art like manga which reached its golden age in the 1980s and 1990s which was the most progressive timeline of the medium. It became one of Japan’s most popular cultural export in the west.
Such history would only logically explain the current popularity of manga in the west. However, talking about the present, Manga annual sales in the U.S. has increased by 9% in 2022, and comic book stores increased by 12.5%. According to the comic news website Beat, they reported the numbers of increase of 171.1% rise in manga volumes in 2021. The manga subcategory contains 76.71% of volumes sold in the category of Adult Fiction. Regarding the discrepancies and inaccuracies, these would be from the different classifications.
The basis of these quantities is on piece sales with different classifications such as graphic novels, plain texts, and art books. The overall data was collected from 16,000 different locations covering 85% of the U.S. trade printed book market.
There are plethora of ways to obtain or buy a volume of physical and web manga. Distributors have different ways to provide access to western audiences as much as they could. They could be from e-tailers, merchandisers, independent bookstores, chains, and many more depending on your location. The art and medium of manga can be fully enjoyed once it's read physically, it captures the true essence of what these authors convey in every panel and every page of their paper. However, there are also Manga franchises that can be read online too for convenience purposes.
Image sources and references: