Editor Suggestion Hurts Manga Sales and Cover is Changed

It was only on June 16 that we posted here about a mangaka saying that often editors end up hindering a work more than helping it, and today I bring you one of those cases! Futsuu no Hon wa Arimasen is a romantic comedy manga about a young man who wants to become an author and therefore gets a job at a bookstore, but what he didn’t know is that it is an adult content bookstore.

Futsuu no Hon wa Arimasen is authored by Asakura Giichi and because the story takes place in an adult content bookstore it includes certain types of content, but as far as I’ve seen, nothing too “OH WOW”.

Editor Suggestion Hurts Manga Sales and Cover is Changed

The first volume of Futsuu no Hon wa Arimasen was released in March this year, and what was supposed to be a joyful moment ended up becoming a headache, as now the publisher was forced to change the cover and re-release the manga.

Look at the original cover and tell me if you can find what did go wrong:

Well, the mistake is what is written on the cheek of the main female character of the work, a “R18 Adult Only”. The official manga profile released a statement on its Twitter saying it removed this marking for 2 reasons:

• The R18 mark caused the manga profile to get shadowbanned constantly on social media, which was hurting promotion
• Readers reported difficulty in buying the manga, since people around them would think it was an adult comic

Because of this, this is the new cover, and all future covers will follow the same pattern:

The Futsuu no Hon wa Arimasen manga profile also revealed that putting the R18 Adult Only mark on the cover was entirely the editor’s idea, in the official statement’s own words:

“The inclusion of the R18 label on the cover was done at the editor’s suggestion, who said: ‘The manga will be even more interesting if we add it.’” They ended the note by apologizing to the author Asakura Giichi and to readers for the inconvenience.