Section 2: Getting a Manga Published (Part 3)

This is the last week of my real estate course, and there’s only the one big accounting exam left on Friday! Getting back to finishing the last 6 pages of “Civilised People” next week!

  • This is part of an on-going blog series called “Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West“. The Table of Contents is here.
  • You can buy my “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010” collection as a $4.99 ebook. Get it from Smashwords, Amazon, Apple iBooks, Nook.

 

Part 2a: Submission Policies


When a publisher is open for submissions, they will have a submission guideline on their website somewhere. All publishers who are in business ought to have a website these days, so do take note if one doesn’t – that would be a little odd in this day and age.

Anyway, make sure you read their submission guideline and follow all the instructions on it. It doesn’t matter how well you write or draw if you can’t follow simple instructions. This is especially important when the guidelines cover genres or formats that the publisher accepts. If you submit a romance novel to a horror publisher, it won’t leave a good impression of you on that publisher. It shows that you have no idea what books they publish, and no inclination to do research.

A guideline will cover the things you need in a submission, but if you’ve been invited to submit something privately, you’ll have to come up with a professional-looking submission on your own. This isn’t as hard as it sounds – as I said before, a submission is a summary of your story, and as long as you give a concise and accurate summary, it should be fine.

Unfortunately, giving a good summary doesn’t mean a publisher will green-light your book. A publishing schedule is dependent on the needs of the market and that particular publishing house, so if you’re rejected, it could be any number of reasons. Most of them probably have nothing to do with the quality of your submission, though I must point out that ‘pitching’ is an art form in itself. A good writer may not be able to ‘sell’ their work well, so it’s important you take that into account when you write your pitch. You’re a salesman, not a creative, when you pitch.

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Next Wednesday, I detail what’s going to be in your pitch. (Meanwhile, I guess you can scour the Internet for publishers looking for open submissions.)

Section 2: Getting a Manga Published (Part 2)

Just want to clarify that “Section 2: Getting a Manga Published” will be about getting your manga published by a publisher, NOT self-publishing. Self-publishing (as ebooks and print books) will be addressed in “Section 3“. Section 2 comes first because the majority of questions I get asked are “how do I get a publisher to publish my work” sort of questions.

  • This is part of an on-going blog series called “Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West“. The Table of Contents is here.
  • You can buy my “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010” collection as a $4.99 ebook. Get it from Smashwords, Amazon, Apple iBooks, Nook.

 


 

Part 2: Manga Submissions

What is a ‘submission’? Well, there’s many names for it (including a ‘pitch’), but generally it’s a summary of the story you want to write/draw, and which you want to get published. There’s no set way to create a submission (it’s dependent on the needs of each individual publisher), but they usually follow the same outline.

To put it in the simplest terms, a ‘submission’ is your sales pitch for why a publisher will want to invest in and publish your story.

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If you want to get your submission to a publisher, the easiest way is to submit directly to a publisher. Contrary to popular belief, this is actually possible – provided that the publisher has an ‘open door’ policy and accepts submissions from strangers over the internet.

To be honest, this is very rare. Due to the vast numbers of wannabe comic book artists (manga-style or otherwise), it’s impossible for most publishers to have an ‘open door’ approach. They would get buried in submissions, and have all the problems of having to sift and read through them, not to mention sending out rejection letters. Most publishers (and editors especially) are overworked, and don’t have time to do things like this. So they would just rather shut their doors and focus on what they have, or they turn to the agents.

For that reason, most publishers are ‘invitation-only,’ meaning they’ve either seen your work elsewhere (online or print), or saw your work at a portfolio review and is interested in working with you. Usually an editor will contact you directly, and invite you to either submit more art samples or pitch your own story. Alternatively, a writer that a publisher is already working with likes you and your work, and makes a point of wanting to work with you (which is what happened to me on Kylie Chan’s book ‘Small Shen’, or on Dean Koontz’s ‘Odd Thomas’ series).

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So, for the purposes of this post, let’s assume that you’ve either been invited, or there is a comic publisher with an ‘open door’ policy. How should you approach them? Find out next Wednesday!

Section 2: Getting a Manga Published

  • This is part of an on-going blog series called “Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West“. The Table of Contents is here.
  • You can buy my “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010” collection as a $4.99 ebook. Get it from Smashwords, Amazon, Apple iBooks, Nook.

 

Part 1: Introduction

When people email me asking ‘how do I get published as a manga artist,’ they expect me tell them which manga publisher to submit to. Usually I end up telling them that there are no more publishers in North America who publish western manga exclusively, and even all the publishers I’ve worked for since 2007 are imprints of major book publishers (not comic book publishers). So if I’m going to give advice, it’ll mostly be for book publishers in the bookstore market and not comic book publishers, since that’s my personal experience.

Before I start, I ought to tell you that selling comics in the bookstore market is a different game to selling comics in general. In the bookstore market, you’re part of the book-selling world, a multi-billion dollar industry that dwarfs the comic book market. For that reason, comics and manga are treated as categories in bookstores, rather than mediums (what they rightfully should be) or even genres.

If you’ve ever seen an artsy indie comic being shelved next to Pokemon in a bookstore, I’m sure you know what I mean. It’s an on-going problem that isn’t going to change any time soon (even if big chain bookstores disappear).

Another problem is that unlike prose fiction, manga and comics are rarely created in advance. Most prose fiction writers will finish a book and then mail it off to agents and publishers, but manga artists don’t have that luxury. The costs of producing a comic is so large compared to prose, that few people hoping to get published will attempt it without first getting a publisher’s backing. This is something that definitely makes getting a manga published harder than other kinds of books.

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Anyway, this section of posts intends to cover the entire production process of creating a book, starting from submitting to a publisher, signing a contract, being paid an advance, getting the book edited, having the book ordered, having it shipped, and having it either sold or returned at the end. It’ll also covers any royalties you earn (85% of books don’t earn out their advance, and hence the authors get no royalties), which usually comes after all this. NB. If your work contract is a lump sum of money upfront, then it’s a work-for-hire contract and you never earn any royalties after. You also retain no rights to your work.

Along the way, I’ll try and cover any pitfalls, and what to be mindful of. This is especially important in the contracts section, because contracts are what have undergone drastic changes in book publishing. People have always signed bad publishing contracts, but it only extended to the book they’re signing for, and not to any other work the author produces aside from that book. These days, contract terms may cover what the author can or cannot do outside their book(s) for the publishers, so BEWARE.

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Next Wednesday, I’ll be tackling the easy part. Submitting the story you’ve written to a publisher, and how to compile a submission for an original manga.

Table of Contents: Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West

  • This is part of an on-going blog series called “Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West“. The first post is here.
  • You can buy my “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010” collection as a $4.99 ebook. Get it from Smashwords, Amazon, Apple iBooks, Nook.

 

Section 1: My Story – Being a Professional Manga-Style Comic Artist in the West

  1. Part 1: Introduction
  2. Part 2: My Publishing History
  3. Part 3: How I Got Started – Drawing my own Manga Series
  4. Part 3a: ‘The Dreaming’ Series (2004-2007)
  5. Part 3b: The TOKYOPOP Manga Pitching Process
  6. Part 3c: The Beginning of the End of TOKYOPOP
  7. Part 4: Working as a Manga-Style Comics Illustrator
  8. Part 4a: Manga was Either being Pirated, or Considered to be For Kids
  9. Part 4b: Dean Koontz and the ‘Odd Thomas’ Series (2007-2010)
  10. Part 4c: Manga Bit-Parts of Media Empires
  11. Part 5: Comics-Prose with ‘Small Shen’ (2011-2012)
  12. Part 5a: ‘I wanted 3 Days of Entertainment from a $10 Book’
  13. Part 5b: ‘Manga comes in BOOK form?!’
  14. Blog Aside: Never, Ever Work for Free. Ever.
  15. Part 5c: Mixing Prose and Comics
  16. Part 6: Taking Time Out to Wait a While
  17. Blog Aside: Does OEL Manga ‘Sell’ or Not?

 

Section 2: Getting a Manga Published

  1. Part 1: Introduction
  2. Part 2: Submissions
  3. Part 2a: Submission Policies
  4. Part 2b: Putting a Submission together
  5. Part 2c: Sending a Submission
  6. Part 2d: Getting a Rejection from a Publisher
  7. Part 2e: Dealing with a Rejection from a Publisher
  8. Part 3: Agents
  9. Part 3a: What is an Agent?
  10. Part 3b: Why do Agents exist?
  11. Part 3c: Where can a manga-style comic artist find an Agent?
  12. Part 3d: WARNING: Unscrupulous Agents and Scammers Exist
  13. Part 4: You got a Publishing Deal!
  14. Part 4a: Dealing with a Publishing Contract
  15. Part 4b: Firstly, What are you Selling to a Publisher when you enter into a Publishing Agreement?
  16. Part 4c: What is Copyright?”
  17. Part 4d: If I Sell an Exclusive License to a Publisher, How Long does that License Last For?
  18. Part 5: Getting Paid – Publishing Advances
  19. Part 6: Books Shipped and Books Returned (FINAL)