It’s a nice move for Michel Lafon. The French publisher has just signed a partnership with the Korean Giant Naver the leader of French webtoon market – a comic book format for smartphones born in South Korea and booming in France and around the world -, with more than 2 million monthly active users on its French platform called webtoon. This agreement will in particular allow the tricolor group to have a right of preference on the main webtoon franchises belonging to Naver in order to adapt them in paper version.
Several projects are already in the pipeline. In the fall, the first two opuses of each of the “Marry My Husband” and “High School Mercenary” series will thus be marketed in bookstores with respective circulations of 80,000 (40,000 for each of the two volumes) and 60,000 (30,000 for each of the two volumes) copies. Next year, six new series will see the light of day.
“It’s a very buoyant market and one of our priorities will be to offer these books at more attractive prices. Today, the standard that has been established on the French market is approaching 15 euros and we are going to try to move towards a rate closer to 10 euros, explains Elsa Lafon, general manager of Michel Lafon. We are going to invest more in the webtoon, in particular by lifting the foot a little on other activities”.
The success of “White Blood”
Today, Michel Lafon generates 60% of his turnover through black and white literature and the rest through illustrated books: comics, manga (including “Ki & Hi”, a very popular) but also webtoon. Already. Since last year, Michel Lafon has published several volumes of “White Blood” and has sold nearly 100,000 units in all. The success of the adaptation of this license belonging to… Naver counted in the latter’s decision regarding the merger with the French group.
“It’s a publishing house that knows the codes of webtoon and that has often embarked on formats aimed at new generations of readers, as during their partnership with Webedia, notes Emilie Coudrat, development manager of the webtoon offer from Naver in France. For our part, until now we did traditional “licensing” in France for paper adaptations and we are going to continue. But we also wanted to get more involved and not completely let go of the baby all the time. We know the tastes of our readers well, we see the series that work well on our platform and everyone will bring what they know how to do with Michel Lafon”.
Currently, the most notable success of the webtoon in print adaptation in France is called “Solo Leveling”, a license from the Korean rival of Naver: Piccoma (owned by the Kakao group) . Published by Kbooks (belonging to the Delcourt group which will soon close Verytoon, its online webtoon distribution platform ), all the opuses of this flagship franchise have sold 1.2 million units since April 2021. But even in webtoon, records are made to be broken.