Previously picking a manga to read in the US was relatively simple. There were only a handful of series being translated and the primary supply for an individual was your local bookstore whose selection was probably around a dozen series. Nowadays some bookstores have several bookcases of manga while the internet and scanlators make almost any manga a viable reading option.
Your first major choice in reading manga is relatively simple, how do you want to read? If you want to read actual books then your selection is limited to what you can find in bookstores or borrow from libraries or your friends. This limits what you have to pick from but can still be a pretty big pool. If you are willing to read online your selection expands exponentially and filtering and searching becomes easier. Either way you still have a lot of choices available and need some way to narrow it down.
The most obvious way to narrow down your choices is to decide which general genre you want to read. If you want to read something actiony you can probably ignore your friend's collection of shoujo romances. You can take this as intensively as you want you could just search for adventure stories or you could narrow your search to only stories about girls who play lacrosse. The more specific your genre narrowing the fewer things you'll have to pick between but you may have trouble finding anything if you are too specific or don't have a good way to filter your options.
An important thing to consider when picking a manga to read is how long a series do you want to read. If you want to spend an hour reading and be done you'll want to make sure that the series is relatively short. The other important consideration about length is if you care about if the series is completely available to read. Many times I've started reading a series only to find out that it was never fully released or has a sequel that hasn't ever been translated. Almost nothing is as disappointing as reading a series only to find out that you can't read the ending now and might never be able to.
From here you might have just a few series to pick or you might have several hundred. At this point you've filtered out stuff that isn't what you want and are on to picking something based on the individual content. The best way to get a general overview of a series is to read the description on the back of the first volume(later volumes may have a summary but risk potential spoilers) and look at the cover. On this topic the best advice I can give is to direct you to a presentation done by Rym and Scott of Geek Nights at Anime Boston about how to judge and anime based on the very small bit of information provided online before a series starts to air. Most of their guidelines are equally valid for judging manga since the main information available for both before reading or watching is a short summary and a cover.
Beyond the guidelines given above the only other piece of advice I have for picking a manga is to ask for input from your friends who also read manga. Just as with any other hobby if someone spends a lot of time interacting with something they tend to know stuff about it. If you have a friend who's been reading manga for 10 years he probably knows a series that you haven't read that you'll like and can warn you about stuff that's deceptive. Also if he knows what kind of stuff you've been reading and enjoyed he'll probably give you better recommendations than any kind of search done by you since he's already read it and knows about things that your search will miss. Of course this method isn't perfect, people have different opinions about what makes a manga amazing and they probably won't recommend something that they don't like themselves. This means that occasionally your friend might not recommend a series which is a perfect fit for you, fortunately they will most likely still give you good advice about other series and if you ask multiple people then you should find that series eventually.
I hope this article will be helpful to you and strongly recommend the video since it covers a lot of really good points for anime fans. I'll be back later this week with the anime and manga reviews and will be at First Night at URI this sunday night.
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