Author Offers Doujin for Free After Resellers Emerge
Japan is known for some strong reselling practices. Whenever a new manga, figure, or any popular item, whether limited edition or not, is released, resellers swiftly make their move. They purchase as much as they can and then list these items on the internet for resale at significantly higher prices.
We’ve previously reported on several cases of reselling, such as the one involving the author of Tejina-senpai, for instance. She faced considerable criticism recently for creating a “netorare” manga based on her own work. Furthermore, in 2021, she even gave away autographed volumes of Tejina-Senpai to her fans.
Guess what happened next? On the very next day, some of the volumes she had autographed were already available on resale websites. Today’s case, however, involves another mangaka who also had to deal with these resellers, but at least he found a way to strike back.
Author Offers Doujin for Free After Resellers Emerge
Haiji Nakasone is a mangaka known for creating doujinshi and adult manga. He decided to take a bold step after witnessing what happened to his work.
Here’s what happened: he released a new doujinshi that he and some fellow mangakas had created based on Blue Archive (yes, an adult doujinshi). To give you an idea, the original author was selling the doujinshi for 200 yen at an event (around 1.36 usd).
However, Nakasone discovered that copies of his doujinshi were already being sold on reselling websites, and what’s worse, they were being sold for 3,000 yen (around 20.35 usd).
As a way to thwart the resellers, Nakasone decided to offer the entire doujinshi for free on his Pixiv profile. His action garnered more attention than he had anticipated, with his tweet being viewed over 3 million times!
Reactions were positive towards the author’s gesture, with many criticizing resellers and those who buy from them. This only perpetuates the situation and causes headaches for otakus across various realms.
I remember a similar case involving a special Kimetsu no Yaiba product. Just like with the manga itself, when the anime exploded in popularity and manga volumes started disappearing from stores, they were resold online at much higher prices.
via TWITTER