Category: Publishing

Blog Aside: Never, Ever Work for Free. EVER.

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I was supposed to continue my blog post series “Being a Pro Manga Artist in the West” today, but I decided to do a “blog aside” thanks to some of the comments I’ve received on the Inkblazers site. I joined that site on the weekend, and I’ve gotten a fair number of comments.

People asked some good questions, and I answered them, but I’m getting the impression that a number of people on this site are young, and while some have certainly been to art school, many are clueless on the business side of being a freelance artist. Someone asked a good question about how to support oneself through doing commissions (and graphic novels), and I felt I needed to address this issue in a quickie post.

To be honest, in the years I’ve spent working as a manga artist, I never did much commissions. So I may not be the best person to give this advice, but I will give it anyway, because it’s so important. I actually worked for the family business all along, so I never needed to take on jobs that I didn’t want to take. Still, I did a few commissions, and there is one bit of advice I want to give to someone who wants to work as a freelance artist: NEVER DO COMMISSIONS FOR FREE.

NEVER. EVER. WORK FOR FREE. EVER.

The “NO SPEC WORK” movement has been going on for about 10 years now, so a fair amount of people already know about it. There is an education website devoted to it with an FAQ, which is very good, and utterly worth a read if you’re unfamiliar with this subject. “Speculative work” is where a client asks a freelance artist to design/create something for them on the client’s specifications, with the promise of payment in the future, though NOT the promise that the work will be used.

Either way, if you’re an aspiring graphic artist who intends to try and make a living from it, you should read this. However, I admit the site seems geared towards people who are already working as professional graphic designers, so I’ll sum this up for you in simple terms. Should you want do work in art, whether as a manga artist, an illustrator, concept designer or whatever:

NEVER. EVER. WORK FOR FREE. EVER.

On the most basic level, working for free sends a message that art is worth nothing. Specifically, it sends the message that YOUR art (and time) is worth nothing. Believe me, once people find out you’re a graphic designer, they will come to you with a million offers to work for them for free. And if you have any sense, then you would say NO.

You say NO because you have bills to pay, and because you’re trying to make a living from your art. There are a million other reasons on the internet why you should never work for free, so I’ll spare you the details. I suggest you do some research yourself, because it’ll help a lot.

But what if you’re just starting out, and you’re offered exposure in return for free work?

That’s a very silly argument, but one that is constantly made. So I’m gonna gut this fish open, and throw all the smelly entrails around so this TEMPTATION to work for free will be slayed and scattered into the dirt once and for all.

It’s not that exposure is bad, it’s just that working for free in return for exposure is utterly ridiculous. People constantly over-estimate what exposure will bring them, and worse of all, they do free work in return for exposure, in the anticipation that your hard work for free will somehow magically bring money sometime in the distant future. It’s unlikely, and here’s two reasons why:

  • SITUATION ONE: I’m an advertising executive, and I see a ad with an amazing illustration. I totally think it’s a great look and style, so what do I do? Do I find out who the artist is? Nah. I snap a picture of the ad with my iPhone, then send the picture to my in-house graphic designer, who I pay as part of my company. And my employee will copy that style, because they’re my employee and they’ll do as they’re told. (The only situation where the ad executive won’t do that, is if the graphic designer is famous and has a large fan following. But if you’re just starting out, you won’t have a large fan following, will you?)
  • SITUATION TWO: I’m a marketing person in a company, and I just got someone to do great artwork for me, in return for exposure. It gets lots of attention, so I brag to all my marketing friends that I got this great artwork for free. All my jealous friends will now contact this amazing artist to do free work for them too. But it turns out this amazing artist now wants to charge $500 for doing work. Oh, what the heck? Talk about jilted expectations. All the people looking for free work will now lose interest, because they finally thought they’d found some schmuck to do free work that’s actually GOOD.

Exposure’s great, everybody. But paid exposure is better than unpaid exposure. Sure, you’ll get less job offers, but you’ll get PAID. Getting paid is kinda crucial to “working for a living”.

What and how much should I charge?

That is entirely up to you, but I charged about $500 per illustration when I was asked to do commissions. I’ve done work for educational magazines, schools, universities, bookstores looking for flyers, companies that put out stationary/folders/etc, and government departments, charities… and guess what, they’re all willing to pay money for work. The people who wanted to get me to do spec work without paying a thing? There’s been 2 cases where I did that, once for a advertising company, the other for a TV studio… and NEVER AGAIN. (In my experience, these folks are happy to look at the spec work you did, then say “nah, that’s not what I’m looking for”. You don’t even get a word of thanks, let alone payment, but you sure feel dumb afterwards).

My suggestion is this: Work out clearly with the client what needs to be done, and charge them a single amount for EACH piece of artwork. Make sure you get them to agree that (a) they are only allowed 2 changes, before you start charging them for each change, and (b) that even if they don’t accept your final artwork, that they STILL have to pay you. There a lot more information on the internet that’ll tell you more about this, so look for it.

I shall leave you with two videos that may be educational. One is from a guy who runs a graphic design company, and the other is from Harlan Ellison, a well-known writer. (If you think that artists are the only people who get short-changed by people, they’re not.)


 
 

Section 1: My Story as a Pro Manga Artist (Part 10)

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Part 5b: ‘Manga Comes in Book Form?!’

Sometime in 2010, I was asked by my old high school to come and do a workshop teaching their manga fans to draw manga. I was probably the only professional manga artist for miles around, and I do this from time to time, so I said yes. I ended up teaching a dozen or so aspiring manga artists, which was fun. They were bright girls from a prestigious private girl’s school, so they had interesting questions to ask.

It’s normal for someone to ask ‘How do I become a professional manga artist’ in these situations. I have a variety of canned replies to that. However, one of the other industry-related questions they asked threw me.

‘How do publishers make money if they put all their manga online?’

I had a horrible feeling about what they were really asking. They were undoubtedly reading all their manga from pirated sites like MangaFox, and not paying a cent for it.

By 2010, OneManga had been slayed by a coalition of publishers serving a cease-and-desist notice, but more pirate sites were popping up to fill the void. A lot of them seemed to be owned by the same entities, and were user-upload sites, meaning they could circumvent certain legal issues which may bring down similar sites. Either way, if there was a war against manga piracy going on, then that war has already been lost.

I gently let them know that while reading manga online wasn’t evil, you should always buy manga in book form to support the manga artists and their publishers.

Their reaction was one of astonishment.

‘Manga comes in book form?!’

Yes, this crop of 8th graders were amazed that manga originated on printed paper. They didn’t know that manga made of dead trees existed, and that you can buy them… somewhere. This workshop was happening in the middle of the library, and we were surrounded by scores of printed books. Somehow, that made it even more horrible.

Obviously, they then asked where they could buy their favourite series. Living where we were in Sydney, Australia, it was near impossible due to the lack of official translated copies available, so I tried to explain that yes, reading pirated manga online is bad but I understand if it’s the only option…

Wait a minute. So now I was defending the manga pirates? Why in God’s name was I advocating schoolgirls to read pirated online manga? Obviously I was doing it because they had no option but to buy the books, which wasn’t possible, but that wasn’t the real problem.

The real problem was that an entire generation of manga-readers have now grown up believing that manga is free on the internet. Some of them were completely unaware than printed copies of manga exist, and even if they were, they don’t have the resources or an interest in buying them. Even if they did, why buy printed manga, when there are thousands of free manga to read on the internet, accessible only by the click of a button?

I asked them whether manga is really popular at the school. They said yes. According to them, the school gives out laptops to the Year 9 students, who then spend all their lunch breaks in the library, taking advantage of the free wifi to read pirated manga online. I imagine the school finds some way to block porn sites, but they don’t block manga sites, because I suspect the school doesn’t really know or understand anything about it.

So there you have it, folks. No wonder manga readers stay the same age and never seem to grow any older. By the time this lot turns 18, they would have read more manga than some people would have in their entire lifetimes (at some point, I imagine they just burn out and lose interest). They’ve certainly read more manga than I have, and I’ve been reading it for over 30 years, though unlike some of them, I paid to buy my favourite manga.

Anyway, I walked out of that workshop feeling totally dispirited. To be honest, by then, I already wanted to do something different to traditional manga-style comics, but this spurred me on. I didn’t want to stop drawing in manga style, but it was clear that I needed some kind of change. I needed to keep drawing comics, but do it… differently. This meant that I had to change not only how I did comics, but also how it would be marketed.

*****

 

Next Monday, I will talk more about how “Small Shen” did in bookstores, and more about the significance of how it did.

Section 1: My Story as a Pro Manga Artist (Part 9)

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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.

Section 1: My Story as a Professional Manga Artist (Part 8)

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Part 5: Comics-Prose with ‘Small Shen’ (2011-2012)

In 2010, I was winding down in terms of illustrating for Dean Koontz. I was on the way to doing three books with them already, and I was looking for a change, which amazingly, did come at the right time. A nice lady called Kylie Chan approached me at a convention, and asked me to do a graphic novel version of a short story she had written called ‘Small Shen.’ It was the prequel to her best-selling Chinese fantasy series called ‘White Tiger,’ which had sold very well in Australia. I was about to draw the third ‘Odd Thomas’ book for Dean, so I had to push her back, but I eventually started working on ‘Small Shen’ in 2011, for Kylie’s publisher Harper Collins Voyager.

‘Small Shen’ was different to all the other manga I’ve done – it’s actually a mix of prose and comics. This may sound a highly unusual step, but Kylie was very supportive, and I also have other reasons to go into this mix and experiment with the format of comics. Part of the reason was because I also felt that comics, my own work included, was getting stale. The other reasons are far more complex, and it has to do with a mixture of economics and issues with production.

For folks who are wondering what “comics-prose” is, I have a few sample pages here. It’s basically a mix of prose and comic panels, arranged in a way that mixes the two together into a single, seamless, INTEGRATED narrative. Here’s some pages from “We are the Pickwicks” below.

“Comics-prose” is both comics and prose. If you ask me, it leans more towards comics than towards prose, in terms of execution (if not reading experience, which is different for everyone). For those who want to read stories told in this style, here’s more:

 

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*****

Either way, working in comics-prose has been fun and exciting, and I’ve since discovered it to be a new and complex way of visual story-telling. But first, I should FINALLY tell you about two minor events that shook me up in 2010, and how it made me question the path I’ve been on (which will be next Monday).