As February goes rolling by, we’re slowly approaching the first birthday of 2D Market. Granted, if you dig through our Twitter feed, you’ll notice that our first tweet was from late 2012. That’s a long time time ago, but it shows how long we’ve been working on this project. However, it wasn’t until the end of February of last year that we (somewhat unceremoniously) launched and started proving the English-speaking community with a legal way to directly support the Japanese independant artists.

So, looking back at our first year, what can we say that we accomplished?

We’ve launched with 13 doujinshi and published 11 more during the year. We’ve added two more circles to our portfolio. We’ve even published an all-ages doujinshi, the first one of its kind to get an official English release.

A fraction of what 2D Market offers

On paper, this doesn’t appear to be much. After all, on average we’ve published a single doujinshi per month. Nevertheless what we’ve created is much more valuable and much less tangible: we’ve shown that there’s a way for Japanese authors to sell their independent creations directly to their international fans and that there is an English-speaking market that’s willing to support them.

With that in hand, we been approaching authors in Japan and looking to bring their work to our site. In fact, one of the reasons our launch has been so belated is the fact that one of our core staff members has moved to Japan in September 2014. Since then, he has been working tirelessly on expanding our catalog. During the last year, he has visited over a dozen doujinshi conventions in Japan and made business contacts (and personal friendships) with several doujinshi authors. While not all of them resulted in partnerships with our site, they have at least put the idea of a possible international debut in the minds of many Japanese doujinshi artists. And that is a great win for all of us who enjoy and appreciate their work and hope to one day be able to express our appreciation, one way or another.

Some of those contact did, however, result in a partnership with our site. In the following few days we’ll be making daily posts on this blog, announcing the new circles whose works we’ll be adding to our site in the following year. These announcements will be the culmination of the effort everyone here has made in the last year, and we’d would like to use this opportunity to thank the Japanese authors for putting their fate in us, and most of all, to thank you, our fans and customers, for allowing us to try to turn our passion into a business.

-2D market staff

Tune in tomorrow for the first of our announcements.