Tag: comics

Section 1: My Story as a Professional Manga Artist

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  • 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.

 

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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

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

Being a Professional Manga Artist in the West

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Note: I put my “Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010” collection up on the internet as a USD$4.99 PDF (plus EPUB, DRM-free). Get it from Smashwords!

Hi all! As promised, I’m going to start writing a series of articles talking about my experiences as a ‘professional manga-style comic-book artist’ in the west. (Perhaps the proper term is ‘OEL manga-artist,’ but god forbid we bring back the spectre of the ‘is it manga or not’ debate).

Anyway, my first published work was in 2004 with TOKYOPOP, and this year marks a 10-year anniversary of life as a published author/artist. Along the way, I’ve had 9 books published with four different publishers, and learned a lot about the industry, not to mention the ever-changing state of the industry.

Both the book and comics publishing industry is constantly in flux, even more so with the onset of digital publishing in the past 5 years. Part of the reason why I’m writing these articles is because the publishing landscape has changed so drastically, the advice I’ve been giving out on my website FAQ is now useless.

The other reason is that there are challenges unique to Manga-style comic-book artists in the West that I want to address. To be honest, I’m not sure if the advice I give will apply to comic book artists who don’t draw in a manga-style. Let’s face it, while indie comickers and the superhero crew tolerates manga from Japan, they don’t want to be lumped in the same category as westerners drawing so-called ‘OEL manga’. Obviously, this can make things difficult from a professional point-of-view if you’re an aspiring manga-style artist looking to get published. Doors can literally slam in your faces, not because publishers don’t like manga, but because western-style manga doesn’t sell.

I don’t know what form these articles will take, but I think they’ll follow this general form:

  • My own experiences as a professional manga-style comic artist, from 2004 to now
  • An explanation of how the book and comics publishing industries work, and what’s currently happening
  • How to self-publishing your own stories, in both e-book and print format
  • A guide to doing ‘comics-prose’ (a mix of prose and comics, which is what I’m currently doing)

For that second point, I wish to focus on the business side of things. I get emails from manga artist wannabes from time to time, especially art school graduates, and I’ve noticed that many of them seem to have no business skills or understanding of the creative industries whatsoever. I’ve no art training myself, so I have no idea what they’re being taught in art school, but I know that it’s not enough to do deal with these changing times. These past 10 years have been a traumatic time for publishing, so I want to use my knowledge of inform people of the potential pitfalls should they manage to get a publishing deal. Especially when the pitfalls seem to be getting bigger all the time.

Anyway, feel free to ask questions in the comments as I go along. I shall try to answer your questions as much as I can. See you all next Monday.

 

...Because I might as well have some fun talking about my work as a manga artist in the west

Buy My Short Manga Collection as a $4.99 PDF

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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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Queenie Chan: Short Stories 2000-2010
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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!

The Dreaming – Repost

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Purchase ‘The Dreaming’: You can buy the print version of ‘The Dreaming’ @ USD$14.99 at the RightStuf.com, and buy the e-books @ USD$5.99 at Comixology!
 
Hello all! It’s 2014, and it’s time to do a retrospective on the last 10 years of my career as a ‘professional comic-artist who works in an OEL-manga style.’ That’s a mouthful, but there’s no way that I will call myself a ‘professional OEL-manga artist‘ – that term is long dead and buried (not to mention rife with negative connotations.)
 
Anyway, I’m in a reflective mood, so there’s something I want to do: I want to share with you the first 2 volumes (out of 3) of ‘The Dreaming,’ my first ever published work. Since I’ll only be posting 2 volumes, if you want to read the rest, I suggest you buy it at the links above.
 
I’m also posting this on DeviantArt, SmackJeeves, MangaFox, Tumblr and sorta on my GoodReads blog (because why not).
 
I’ll be posting half a chapter every Friday at the listed places, until August. Meanwhile, I’m looking to do a series of industry posts talking about my time working as a professional comic artist who draws manga, and some of the difficulties in the industry right now. Look for it in the coming months!
 

Click on this page to read “The Dreaming“!