Last week, I posted up a Table of Contents for “The Dreaming”, a series I’ll be running until March (on DeviantArt). This week, I saw goodbye to drawing traditional manga, at least for a long while.

Here is the collected edition of all my best short manga stories in PDF format @ USD$4.99, drawn from 2000-2010. It’s titled ‘Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010‘, and it’s sort of a eulogy to the last 10 years of my work. As you all know, I’m drawing comics-prose now, and am planning on writing a long blog series on my 10 years as a professional manga artist. I think self-publishing this collection is a good way to say ‘bye!’ to that part of my life.

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PURCHASE THIS:

Buy as PDF @ USD$4.99 on Smashwords: here. It’s also available on Apple iBooks, Kobo and Nook.
Buy as E-book @ USD$4.99 on Amazon: here

Buy as Print book @ USD$13.99 on Lulu: here
(USD$4 for US shipping, $8 for International shipping)
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Here are the list of stories:

They’re all available online, on this website.

1. Sister Holmes (Mystery)
2. Elevator (Ghost Story)
3. The Two-Dollar Deal (Cute Romance)
4. Forget-Me-Not (Chinese Fantasy Mystery)
5. Shoes (Ghost Story)
6. Sleeping Chick (Cute Animal Story)
7. Portrait of a Sociopath (Real-life horror)
8. Message to You (Cute Romance)
9. Ten Years Ago Today (Serial Killer horror)
10. Keeper of the Soul (Epic Fantasy)
11. A Short Ghost Story (Ghost Story)

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Some Thought on Self-publishing

Believe it or not, the most interesting thing about putting this book online as an e-book was how far the e-book market has come. In 2010, when this e-book thing got series, I actually turned my manga stories into e-books and tried to upload them onto e-book stores such as Apple’s iBookstore. They were rejected, probably because they were comics, and I was very disappointed.

It’s now 2014, and that’s completely changed. Apple iBooks now totally accept comics, and there are dozens of e-book sites that let you buy e-books and sell your own. Smashwords itself lets you upload your work to iBooks, Nook and the Kobo, letting you manage one sales account rather than three (NB. There seems to be some image display issues with the older Nooks. Avoid it if you’ve got one, and stick to the PDF format on Smashwords). They take 15% off the sales price of your work, on top of that of the 30% charge by Apple/Kobo/Nook, but that’s still a 55% profit. Do you know what you get in a traditional book contract? 8-10%, and that was years ago (now, it’s much worse).

The biggest surprise, however, was Amazon. Amazon obnoxiously charges a 15c download fee per megabyte, which stacks the odds against comics a lot due to the big graphic files (Hence this volume is +$1 on Amazon). But I must say that Amazon is extremely user-friendly, and while it requires slightly more paprework to start an account there, they have a special program that you can use to make your comics view better on the Kindle. They didn’t have that a few years ago, and now they do. That’s progress.

Anyway, next week, I’ll be posting some industry posts – basically a retrospective of my experiences working as a pro manga artist in the last 10 years. The thing is already written, yay, and is pretty long. It’s only the first section though, so wow. This is gonna get serious. Stay tuned!