• 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 3c: The Beginning of the End of TOKYOPOP

Working with TOKYPOP was fine as an experience, and I had editors ranging from the good to bad (I will talk about editors in another post). However, TOKYOPOP was always a controversial company, and there were many who had issues with them, ranging from bad contracts to annoying business practices. For me, the biggest problem with that era was not so much drawing/writing ‘The Dreaming,’ but with the way ‘western manga’ was received by the average comic reader.

Needless to say, the superhero and indie crew wasn’t much interested, but neither were actual manga readers. There was an ‘authenticity’ issue with manga readers right from the start, who solidly believed that only manga from Japan are ‘good,’ and manga-style comics from westerners are ‘fake garbage.’ The ‘western manga’ line TOKYOPOP put out also suffered from quality control issues, and most of them never made back money the company had invested. It was just cheaper to license manga from Japan.

Eventually, helped by mismanagement, the line faltered and the company closed its ‘western manga’ line sometime after I finished the last volume of ‘The Dreaming’ in 2007. After that, TOKYOPOP put out a Collected Edition of ‘The Dreaming’ (all three volumes in one, plus a short story), but the company continued to fall apart, and finally folded its publishing division in 2011. The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 and the collapse of Borders book chain in 2011 also contributed, but while these helped to speed things along, it was unlikely to have been the ultimate demise of the company.

I didn’t get involved in any Internet flame wars during that era over the ‘is it manga or not’ debate, but it certainly was a baffling experience. I’m not sure if this attitude still persists today, but I sure as heck don’t want to relive those days again.

Looking back, ‘The Dreaming’ sold quite well and garnered a lot of fans (I got a week-long trip to Turkey to promote it – see my write-up here – and it even has a movie in development), but TOKYOPOP never quite promoted it compared to some of their other properties.

Here in lies an interesting problem with the publishing industry: just because you’ve been published, it doesn’t mean that your publisher will promote you to the reading public. In fact, publishers don’t promote most of the books they publish at all. This is something I’ll be talking about in my later posts.

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See you all next week, when I talk about working as a manga-style comics illustrator for other publishers, from 2008-2013.

• This post is part of a on-going 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 USD$4.99 PDF (plus EPUB, DRM-free). Get it from Smashwords!

 

Part 3b: The TOKYOPOP Manga Pitching Process

I got a dialogue going with an editor at TOKYOPOP, who later became my first TOKYOPOP editor (I eventually had four). She was quite upfront about the nature of TOKYOPOP’s business – their books were aimed at teenage girls, a long neglected market in the American comics industry. Their business strategy was quite clear: get the girl readers into bookstores, where they can read and buy girl-oriented manga. So, it was obvious that action-adventure were not what they were looking for. They suggested I submit something more suitable to teenage girls.

I didn’t mind at the time. This was something that is common in publishing, and has always been common in all creative industries. Publishing is a business, and publishers publish because they want to make money. Sure enough, I submitted twice more, once for a romantic comedy called ‘TwinSide’ and another for a horror story called ‘Block 6,’ but I got rejected yet again.

This was unusual. At the time, I was friends with other manga-style comic artists who were also submitting to TOKYOPOP, and we all congregated on a message board called Pseudome. I knew through the grapevine that other people got green-lit the first or second time, but I didn’t (even though I was more experienced as a webcomic artist than most of them). Anyway, my editor eventually got exasperated by the rejections, and suggested I combine the horror story with the romantic comedy, submitting a ‘haunted school’ story.

Once again, I was ignorant at the time, but I now know that this is called submitting ‘on spec.’ It’s a common practice in the movie business (and also publishing), where the producer or publisher names a genre, and people looking to submit fills the mold that genre requires. The genre I was given was ‘haunted school,’ and I had 3 weeks to whip up something. The story I came up with was ‘The Dreaming,’ and when my then-editor pitched it with just a bunch of concept art I drew, the CEO said yes.

And that was how I landed my first publishing contract. It was rejection after rejection, followed by a bunch of doodles and a concept/genre.

I’m currently running the first 2 volumes of “The Dreaming” series on Smackjeeves. You can read it here.

Years later, after publishing my first book, I discovered that my story had become something of an urban legend at TOKYOPOP. I was helping someone from Pseudome write a submission, and she told me that her pitching editor at TOKYOPOP had told her an anecdote (she had been rejected once already, and her editor told her that story to encourage her). The story was: ‘There was a girl from Australia who got rejected four times before she got a green-light, so don’t despair and keep trying!’

When I heard the story, I was like, Gorsh, I wonder who that was!

 

Anyway, getting rejected all the time is not a bad thing. It’s actually the norm in the publishing industry, and it makes your skin so thick that pretty much everything that comes after getting published can be like water off a duck’s back. It also separates the wheat from the chaff – if rejection and bad reviews is enough to put you off working in the arts, perhaps the arts is not for you.

*****

Next Monday, I talk about the beginning of the end for TOKYOPOP.

• This post is part of a on-going 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 USD$4.99 PDF (plus EPUB, DRM-free). Get it from Smashwords!

 

Part 3: How I Got Started – Drawing My Own Manga Series

This is where I tell the story of how I get published, in more detail than just listing all my books. I tried to keep it short, but I couldn’t, since all of this is necessary to explain the changes in the industry. Anyway, if you’re not interested, just skip it to move onto the next section: the part about contracts and how to get published, etc.

I first started drawing manga in 1998, when I was 18, after reading a volume of Watsuki Nobuhiro’s Rurouni Kenshin. I read manga as a child growing up in Hong Kong, but never drew or wrote anything until I was almost out of high school. I primarily focussed on short manga stories that I then put onto the Internet, which had a fledging community of manga and anime enthusiasts at the time.

 

Part 3a: The Dreaming Series (2004 – 2007)

In 2004, I landed my first publishing contract, writing and illustrating my own series. It was with TOKYOPOP, back then a ballsy start-up that had somehow managed to strong-arm their way into bookstores. Living in Hong Kong at the time, I didn’t even know that manga had made a breakthrough into the North American bookstore market in 2001-2002; I only found out about it through the Internet. One day, when surfing the net, I came across a manga competition called ‘Rising Stars of Manga.’ It was a competition run by TOKYOPOP to discover new manga-drawing talent in the west, with the promise of being published in print as the reward (this will eventually become known as the notorious ‘OEL manga’).

Many people seemed to think I got my foot in the door through RSOM – even my own editors at TOKYOPOP thought that. However, truth is that RSOM was only open to American citizens, and as an Australian there was no way I could enter. I only managed to make contact with TOKYOPOP a year after the competition ran, when TOKYOPOP put up an online notice calling for submissions to them. It specified international or otherwise, and that was because they were looking to produce their own original manga line.

I confess I knew nothing about book publishing at the time, and was only interested in turning my manga-drawing hobby into an actual job. Truth was, I had graduated from UNSW with a Bachelor of Information Systems in 2002, but was unable to find a job because of the dot-com bust. The TOKYOPOP offer came in late November 2003, so I eagerly shoved samples of work into an envelope and mailed it off to TOKYOPOP’s mailing address.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this scenario had two problems: (a) it’s very, very rare that a publisher will open their doors just for anyone to submit, and (b) sending a random bunch of manga pages to a publisher was a breach of protocol. TOKYOPOP had just opened their mail room to the slush pile at that time, and editor Tim Beedle was the one who fished my samples out of the little mountain they had. TOKYOPOP was kind enough to write back to me that you’re supposed to do a proper SUBMISSION, if you’re looking to get published with a publisher.

Oh, what’s a ‘proper submission,’ and how do you write one? I have a sample submission on my FAQ, so read about it here (http://www.queeniechan.com/FAQ). Submissions vary, depending on what the publishing house is looking for, but the gist of them are generally the same.

Anyway, I somehow managed to wrangle up a decent submission, and sent it back to them. It was for ‘A Chinese Ghost Story,’ an action-adventure-romance story I was working on at the time. Unfortunately, I then learned that publishers don’t always publish what you want to publish.

*****

Next Monday, I will talk about my work at TOKYOPOP.

• This post is part of a on-going 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 USD$4.99 PDF (plus EPUB, DRM-free). Get it from Smashwords!

 

Part 1: Introduction

This section deals with the ten years I spent working as a professional manga-style comic book artist in the west. It’s quite long, since part of my goal is to give an overview in the changes that has happened in the industry over that time. It’s meant to be a documentation of working as a manga-style comic book artist from 2004-2014, and a resource for people considering it was a career path.

I don’t want to discourage people from chasing their dreams, but I also want to honest about my life. I get emails from young aspiring manga artists online all the time, asking questions that are very hard to answer. There are tonnes of resources on drawing comics, but none about getting published as a western manga artist very much. (In fact, there’s always a dearth of information about making a living as a comic book artist, because there few people who can make that claim.)

I hope to give some more insight into that in my posts. Along the way, I also hope to answer some questions I get asked a lot, such as ‘can you make a living as a manga-style comic book artist?’

 

Part 2: My Publishing History

I suppose I should list the works I’ve had published in the past 10 years. By ‘had published,’ I mean that (a) a publishing house paid an advance for the book, and (b) the book actually ended up on a bookshelf in an actual bookstore. I self-publish on the side (like everyone else), so it’s important to make this distinction. These parts of the posts are meant to talk about the industry, and ‘industry’ typically means ‘publishing houses that pay money to sell your books to readers who buy them.’ Self-publishing will be a separate section in this series.

 

*****

Here, I give a statistical run-down of my publishing history:

• Number of books published in print: 9 (plus an anthology)
• Number of publishing houses worked for that paid in actual dollars: 5 (TOKYOPOP, Randomhouse Del Rey, Hachette Yen Press, Fairview Press, Harper Collins Voyager)
• Years Active: 2004-2014 (Starting from year of first publishing contract signed)
• Number of editors worked with: 10 (Believe me, the lifespan of editors can be even shorter than that of comic book artists)
• Number of publishers who got replaced during that time: 4 (Publishers are the people who run the individual publishing houses, and they get replaced all the time)
• Number of publishing houses shut down: 1 (I think you all know who this was)
• Number of movies in development: 1 (It’s ‘The Dreaming’ movie. The ‘Odd Thomas’ movie got made and released, folks. I never got to see it. Did anyone reading this see it? How was it?)
• Amount of money made: Probably could have made more working a part-time job in another field.

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Anyway, here’s a list of my published works, plus pictures. Also, where you can buy them to make things easier:

Work: The Dreaming v1-3, The Dreaming (Perfect Collection)
Publisher: TOKYOPOP (2005-2010)
Purchase in Print: RightStuf.com
Purchase as E-book: Comixology

Work: In Odd We Trust (2008), Odd is on our Side (2010), House of Odd (2012), Written by Dean Koontz, Fred Van Lente, Landry Q. Walker, Illustrated by me
Publisher: Random House (Del Rey, 2008-2012)
Purchase #1 as E-book: Amazon
Purchase #2 as E-book: Amazon
Purchase #3 as E-book: Amazon

Work: Boy’s Book of Positive Quotations
Publisher: Fairview Press (2009)
Purchase in Print: Amazon

Work: Forget-Me-Not (Yen Plus Anthology)
Publisher: Hachette (Yen Press, July 2009)
Purchase as part of anthology in Print: Lulu
Purchase as part of anthology as E-book: Smashwords

Work: Small Shen, Comics-Prose format, Written by Kylie Chan, Illustrated by me
Publisher: Harper Collins (Voyager, 2012)
Purchase in Print: Fishpond.com
Purchase as E-book: Amazon

*****

Next Monday, I will tackle how I got started in the industry.