One publishing experiment I’m wondering about is the recent movement of manga companies into the YA fiction market by publishing novels based on manga. I’m not sure what the sales figures for these are, and I don’t have a comprehensive list but it looks like some of them are:

Viz

Fullmetal Alchemist novel 1, 2
Socrates in Love
Kamikaze Girls
Ghost in the Shell

There’s also the novel for Battle Royale, which I seen shelved in the fiction section of bookstores. With the other books listed above, if I’ve seen them anywhere they’ve been shelved with the manga.

Tokyopop’s novel line at least has a standalone page on their web site.

Titles include

.hack//AI buster
CLAMP School Paranormal Investigators
Devil May Cry
Gravitation
Love Hina
Mobile Suit Gundam Seed
Slayers
And they are just now formally launching a YA fiction line with titles like Scrapped Princess.

I hope that these projects do well enough that some Japanese fiction that was the source material for anime and manga gets translated. But I wonder what the sales have been on this type of book so far? I would love love love to read Fyumi Ono’s 12 Kingdoms novels, but I’m guessing that series might be a little too obscure.

I suspect that not many libraries are buying these novels yet. I did a bit of spot checking in WorldCat a little while ago, so some of these numbers might have increased:
6 libraries have the 6th Slayer’s novel
69 have .hack/AI Buster volume 1 and 23 have volume 2
167 libraries have the Battle Royale novel, while 63 have the first volume of the manga. I’m guessing that the numbers are lower for the manga due to graphic visual content, and since the book was the source material for the cult movies and the manga, maybe more people are interested in reading it as opposed to reading a book series spun-off from a manga? The book is also packaged more like a regular trade paperback than some of the other novels based on anime or manga.