Here we are for another week of the Shoseki Ranking, the second most important manga sales ranking in Japan.
HOW THE SHOSEKI RANKING WORKS: The website http://shosekiranking.blog.fc2.com/ provides the top 500 best-selling manga according to their calculations. However, they only show the number of copies sold for specific positions: 30, 50, 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500. Additionally, everything is written in Japanese, which is impossible to understand if you don’t know the language. To find out how much a manga sold above the 30th position, we have to wait for the Oricon Ranking (which provides a top 50 slightly different from Shoseki’s).
At Analyse It, using a simple program we developed ourselves, we automatically translate the titles (written in Japanese) into Romaji, including the volume number, publisher, and release date. Then, the same program performs a progressive calculation of all sales. Afterward, I manually organized everything neatly into an Excel table, as you can see here:
