• 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 4: Working as a Manga-Style Comics Illustrator

After I finished book 2 of ‘The Dreaming’ in 2006, I was contacted by Dallas Middaugh of Randomhouse imprint Del Rey to work as an illustrator for one of Dean Koontz’s series. I jumped at the opportunity – Dean was one of the writers I used to read as a teenager, and I was psyched to hear that he was interested in turning his best-selling work ‘Odd Thomas’ into a manga series.

Dean was a best-selling author and a canny businessman, and he was interested in tapping into a younger market. The goal was to create a manga-version of ‘Odd Thomas,’ his psychic fry cook who can see dead people, since manga had now matured into a known category in bookstores. This was around 2007, manga was perceived as catering to a younger audience, and publishing houses everywhere had tagged it as a ‘youth market.’ Unfortunately, that also meant that more mature manga had a hard time selling in the US.

 

Part 4a: Manga was Either Being Pirated, Or Considered to be for Kids

When publishers saw that youth-oriented manga was selling, they just put more of that into the market and reduced the number of mature titles.

This had a stack-on effect. Few adult readers got into manga because they perceived it as something for children, while children were increasingly turning to the Internet to get their fix of free, pirated manga. 2008 marked a turning point for the publishing industry in general, but especially for manga – it was (a) the year of the Global Financial Crisis, and (b) the year manga aggregators such as OneManga.com truly took off.

 

 

Now, fan-translated manga – called ‘scanslations’ – have been in existence for a while. These used to be small groups of fans, who scanned and translated Japanese volume manga in their own time. They then shared it on the Internet with other fans via IRC or other online servers – a pure expression of their love for the manga (even though it was 100% a violation of the creator’s copyright). Anyway, I remember variations of this having been around as early as 1998, and it was a surprisingly big community. Early scanslations helped build the popularity of manga in the west, and in those days, established publishers even surfed scanslation sites, to help them choose which manga to translate and bring over.

By 2007, however, things had taken a darker turn. Along came manga “super-sites” like OneManga and other sites like it, which amassed all the fan-translated manga they could find and placed it into one big centralised website. This was often done without the permission of the translators, which meant that the pirates got pirated. This made things too easy, and too accessible. Soon, when people realised they could read all the manga they wanted online without paying a cent, they began to stop buying manga.

These two things, rampant piracy and the GFC, combined to cause a catastrophic fall in manga as a publishing category. The glut of publishing also didn’t help. Due to the manga boom, various publishers have also flooded the market with inferior titles, and this just made things worse. In 2013, bookstores sold less copies of manga than they did in 2003, and the numbers still continue to fall.

 

Sales in the “Manga” section of Bookscan, which covers 60-70% of US book sales. These figures were taken from “Tilting at Windmills” by Brian Hibbs at ComicBookResources.com.
 

When I first started working for Dean, it was in 2007, a year before the GFC. What happened after resembled a downward spiral, not just for me, but for the publishing industry as a whole. Two things also happened in 2010 that made me change directions, which I will talk about later.

*****

Next Monday, I’ll be back to talk about my work as an illustrator first. After that, I’ll go into what happened in 2010.

• 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.

*****

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.