• This post is part of a on-going series called “Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West“. The first post is here.
• Buy my short story collection from Bento Comic’s Smashwords storefront @ US$4.99.

Part 5a: ‘I Wanted 3 Days of Entertainment from a $10 Book’

Two incidents happened in 2010 that made me question what I was doing. Both involved my old high school.

Incident One was at a dinner party with my old high school friends, who I still see regularly. It involved my friend Serena (not her real name), who is a doctor working in a high-stress environment. She liked to read in her spare time, and she primarily read chic-lit and romance. She doesn’t read comics, but she bought a copy of ‘In Odd We Trust,’ because she was curious about it and interested in reading it. In our conversation, she mentioned to me that she read the book and liked it. Then, something weird happened.

In the middle of our conversation, Serena suddenly turned to my friend Lara and said something, and I paraphrase:

‘Don’t you just hate it when you buy a book for $10, and it only gives you an hour of entertainment? Normally when I read a book, it takes me two or three days.’

Lara looked baffled at what Serena said – she wasn’t even part of the conversation. The conversation then went someplace else, but the event stuck in my head. For hours after, I remembered this conversation, though it took me a few days to figure out what it really meant. When I finally understood it, I got pretty worried.

Serena was a prose fiction reader with money and time to burn, and she was used to reading prose books that gave her several days’ worth of entertainment for $10. When she read my graphic novel, she paid the exact same price for something that took only an hour or so to read, which must have baffled her. A $10 book gone in an hour is something comics and manga fans are used to, but Serena isn’t a comic reader, and doesn’t seem to care whether something is in prose or in comics. All she cared about was whether she was getting her money’s worth of entertainment from a book.

With a start, I realised what Serena was trying to say.

She was trying to tell me she felt ripped off.

She probably couldn’t bring herself to say so to my face, which resulted in that weird exchange over dinner. Truth is, prose readers are used to value for money. If they buy a book and didn’t get what they think their money’s worth is, they’re unlikely to buy it again, even if they liked the book. Sure enough, Serena never bought another one of my books again, even though she liked the first one.

This made alarm bells ring in my head. If people were counting on comic adaptations of prose best-sellers to fill their coffers, things could get troublesome very soon. Imagine a prose reader buying a YA book called Sexy Creatures for $10, becoming a fan, and then going on to buy the manga adaptation of Sexy Creatures, also for $10. The first reaction to reading the manga Sexy Creatures would probably not be ‘Oh, nice pictures,’ but rather: ‘where’s the rest of the damn story?! I paid $10 for this!!’ Remember, prose readers want stories. They like pretty pictures, but the story is their first concern.

Anyway, this incident shook me, but it didn’t shake me quite as badly as the second incident, which I’ll talk about next Monday.