Am one day early with this book, 99% of the time wait at least three months before posting a photobook. This one was released on November 26th so tomorrow makes three months but had zero else to post about for today and sure one day early will not affect the book's sales at all! Still have that mini goal of having at least one post a day for February so just two more to go. It does sound simple or easy having a post for next two days but I've been struggling the last few days creating posts and in a semi-funny scenario can see myself falling one day short of that goal!
The amount of photobooks seems to decrease each year though for the most part the books are better than ever. Which means a photobook such as this one is forgotten about quickly, five years ago this would have been a very popular book but think it may have been a flop. In it's first week out this book sold 1,925 copies and then dropped out of the top ten for sales. But of course it kept selling after that so perhaps sales ended up being between 4-5,000 copies sold. That's not a huge total but sales for photobooks are so much lower than they were five years ago. Even Nogi books have seen such a huge decrease in sales and think so many fans are growing tired of them. To an extent I've been that way with photobooks and a huge reason is that I've seen so many of them. Over the years there's been a change in the fan bases of J-Pop groups, for instance many original fans of Nogi from over a decade ago may not follow them as closely which means less sales and I'm a prime example of that. So while this is a solid book it wasn't as terrific as I was expecting and that could be why the sales weren't that high.
Hope that's not the case and Riho's acting career has been going well for over five years, she doesn't often have a lead role but has been in too many dramas to count. Riho will be hitting the age of 32 this year but like most women I post about looks much better than she did five or so years ago. So while she looks so fabulous in this book I do have two complaints which I think are good reasons why this book wasn't as good as expected. One is that Riho rarely smiled in any of the pictures and she didn't give off a vibe as though she was having a good time. Not that every photo needs to feature a model smiling but on the other hand hate to see someone overly serious. The other slight negative was the location of the photo shoot which was Tokyo but it was just one hotel room! Sure Riho could have traveled to a different country or Okinawa but instead the setting was in a dark hotel room and there were zero outdoor pictures which is extremely rare for a photobook. Oh well, least Riho still looked terrific in these 110 photos and let's hope this is not the end of her mini gravure career.
