So you want to be a manga millionaire

The principles behind the success of Japan's biggest hits

I spent much of 2025 embedded with artists, editors, and fans of Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump for a feature that was published in The New Yorker. With a million copies in print every week, and many many more distributed digitally, Jump is a literal factory of fantasies – something like six out of Japan’s ten highest-grossing anime series originated as manga in its pages, including legends such as Dragon Ball Z, One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Demon Slayer.

Megahits like these have the power to shape the destinies of creators, companies, even Japan’s economy as a whole. To put it in Dune terms, manga is the spice of Japan’s pop-cultural industry, and Jump has a near monopoly on mining the best (or at least most profitable) stuff.

Shueisha has the best of both worlds, possessing a deep back-catalog of classics while constantly incubating new ones. Others dream of replicating this kind of success for themselves, on both personal and corporate levels. After the article came out, I was asked to speak to various organizations about this intersection of creativity and commerce. Some were aspiring artists, some entrepreneurs, and others established companies. All of them had the same burning questions: how does Jump do it, and how can they apply the lessons to their own creative endeavors?

I have extracted from my experiences a handful of principles that may help answer these questions. I’ve come to believe they are in fact relevant to everyone from individuals to organizations, whether they are in the manga biz or not. I’ll summarize them here, then expand on them below.

• There are more people making manga in Japan than anywhere else in the world, so Japanese magazines, and Jump in particular, have their pick of the best.

• Manga is close to its readers. Closer than virtually any other mass-media product.

• Data allows its creators to gauge reader interest in real-time.

• If a manga shows promise, the magazine can help boost it, but only the readers have the power to make something a true hit.

• That process often takes time — more time than many foreign companies are willing to give.

Now, here are those principles.

“The highest peaks have the widest bases.”

So says Takeshi Kikuchi, the head of the Manga Research Institute, evoking how much material it took to loft Mt. Fuji’s peak to its lofty heights.

What he means is that the talent pool is immense. In an interview for the article, he told me that he believes there are as many as ten thousand manga artists working in Japan today, producing the equivalent of fifteen thousand softcover collections a year — at roughly 200 pages each, that’s as many as three million pages of manga being made in Japan annually.

The chance that any one of these manga will prove a hit is low, says Kikuchi. But the chances of the art form as a whole generating hits are quite high. Jump uses contests to lure in young artists, then spends great amounts of time coaching the most promising of them. You can read more about this process in the article, but the point is that Jump succeeds because they don’t put all their eggs in one basket. The reason being…

There’s no making a hit, only reacting to one.

The problem with producing content of any quality is that it takes time, and the more time it takes, the more difficult it becomes to predict what the market will look like when the finished product arrives. (For instance, I couldn’t have imagined, when I was writing my book over the course of 2017-2019, that it would arrive in the midst of a global plague.)

The trick with Jump is that the finished product arrives every week, giving producers a chance to see how the market is reacting in near real-time. This is done through the expedient of surveys. They effectively compel creators to work in concert with the readers, who rank their favorite titles, episodes, and characters every issue.

Although surveys have been a staple since Jump was first founded, the approach strikingly resembles the way in which online games can be quickly updated in response to player metrics than it does with how comics, let alone shows or films, are typically made.

Wait, you might be asking. Aren’t streaming platforms like Netflix the king of using big data to drive creative decisions? Sure. But despite all of the algorithms Netflix uses to craft its content, it has yet to produce anything even remotely approaching the zeitgeist-level popularity of any of Jump’s hits. That’s because Jump understands something critical…

You need data. But not too much data.

“Dragon Ball” debuted in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1984. It is widely hailed as one of the world’s great pop-cultural franchises. Shueisha is a privately-held company, and they have never released sales figures per title. We can make guesses, though: given that licensor Bandai-Namco netted 190 billion yen ($1.2 bil USD) from “Dragon Ball” merch in 2024 alone, one can imagine the enormity of the franchise as a whole.

However, it might surprise you to learn that “Dragon Ball” wasn’t a success at first. Artist Akira Toriyama originally envisioned it as an adventure in the vein of the Chinese classic Journey to the West. Readers reacted to this early arc with great ambivalence. It wasn’t for well over a year, until Toriyama introduced a “tournament arc,” that “Dragon Ball” transformed into the martial-arts saga that made it a global mega-smash.

The lesson here, I believe, is knowing when to ignore the metrics. Had Jump’s editors blindly followed them, they might well have cancelled the series before it had a chance to evolve — killing a “cash dragon” in the process. Jump succeeds because while it studiously collects data, it respects the talents of humans — the artists and editors, who carefully balance metrics from readers against the instincts and know-how of its human team. Which leads us to the last principle:

You can’t build an empire if you’re chasing quarters.

Economists roll their eyes when folks refer to “late capitalism,” but what the critics mean is the tipping point when businesses successfully lock customers into their products, their focus inevitably shifts to pleasing shareholders than customers. When this happens, there can be only one result: enshittification.

Jump is successful. It has a huge audience who is locked-in to their favorite series. Yet it has never enshittified. Why?

One of the biggest reasons, I believe, is that Shueisha is privately held. It is not beholden to shareholders who demand profits quarter over quarter. This allows them to take a longer-term view to nurturing talent.

The point here isn’t that taking investment or going public is bad. Whether individual creator, entrepreneur, or business, everyone has their own situation, their own calculus for what’s necessary at the moment. The point is that making something truly great requires time. Do you as an individual, or as an organization, have the courage to provide it?

The same might be said about Weekly Shonen Jump as a publication. In its fifty-eight years of existence, it has launched many hits — but even more failures, at least from a black-and-white, “did it become a megahit or not?” standpoint. Yet it more than endures. It continues to evolve and thrive. That isn’t thanks to money, or algorithms, or pursuing efficiency. It’s thanks to people. And perhaps that’s the most important principle of all.