• 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 6: Taking Time Out to Wait a While

When I finished ‘Small Shen,’ I spent some time off to do some soul-searching.

Having a look at my work over the years, I suddenly realised that I’d spent 5 of those 10 years doing illustration work for other people. The other 5 years was spent pitching to TOKYOPOP and drawing “The Dreaming” – something I enjoyed, but which was done ‘on spec’ (ie. I was asked to write a haunted school story).

That saddened me a little – I learned a lot by illustrating for other people, but it’s not what I got into comics to do. I’m a writer who draws, and I want to write and draw my own stories, not those of other writers, no matter how wonderful they were as people. However, I’d spent a decade of my life doing work for other people, rather than doing my own work. When I realised that, it hit me hard, because a decade is a long time.

From then onwards, I made a decision. From now on, I would only do work I wanted to do. I would only draw and write whatever I wanted, and since the amount of money I made as a pro was never all that much, I wouldn’t care if anyone wanted to buy/read it. I’d do it in my spare time, like most people I knew who did similar stuff, and if I get a publishing deal, then great.

Since then, I have drawn three chapters of a ‘comic-prose’ story, a fairy-tale inspired fantasy story. I had great fun creating it, and for the first time in years, I felt a certain kind of happiness I’ve missed. It was still hard work doing comics-prose, but it’s not as time-consuming as traditional comics. I decided to give that story to my agent to sell, but I promised myself that regardless of whether my story gets picked up by a publisher or not, I’ll continue working on it.

My agent pitched the story to a large publisher I’ve already worked with in August 2013, and got accepted. Unfortunately, even more has changed since the last time I scored a contract, because traditional publishing is now under-going another dreadful change – draconian contracts to fight the dreary economic times.

The editors I pitched to at a major publisher loved my work, but sales and marketing wasn’t sure of the comics-prose format. It was a risky thing to push in this climate, so they could only offer me a contract that wasn’t advantageous to me (from my point of view). I was offered a contract that was actually worse than the first publishing contract I ever signed – at least I got paid an advance for that. When I saw the new contract, it was for no advance, and with a 25% net profit.

My heart sank when I saw what was being offered. I’m quite knowledgeable about the accounting systems of the music and movie industries, and I knew what I was seeing. It has finally happened, folks. Book publishers have finally figured out how to count money like the music and movie industry.

(Conversely, if you have no idea what an ‘advance’ or ‘net’ is, you better read my next section, especially on contracts. A lot of people don’t understand contracts, or even money.)

 

 

For people who are curious, it appeared to have similar terms to one of these contracts, which is being offered by a big publisher. To be honest, most publishers these days have e-book only imprints, and this is one of them: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2013/03/06/note-to-sff-writers-random-houses-hydra-imprint-has-appallingly-bad-contract-terms/

I did some research, and reading the blogs of prose writers across the net revealed that this practice has been widespread since 2011. I was shocked and horrified – net profits in book contracts have always been notoriously difficult to define, and I have never worked without an advance. I couldn’t believe that this has become the standard for new writers. No one in their right mind would sign such a contract (but believe it or not, lots of people do)!

Anyway, I don’t have anything against traditional publishing houses. These are indeed difficult times for publishing, so I intend to sit back, self-publish for a while and see whether things turn around. The good news about me is that after working 10 years in publishing, is that by now, my expectations are realistic. Unless you win the pop-culture equivalent of the lottery, the truth is that most comic artists have day jobs, the same as most writers of prose fiction.

I’m proud to have worked with all the people I did, and produced the books I have, but having experienced what I have at the beginning of my career, I would never sign a bad contract just to get published again.

(Which is why I wrote this series of posts. It’s intended to be educational, so artists can learn to protect themselves, or at least be less clueless.)

***

This pretty much concludes this part of the posts, so thanks for reading. For the next part, I’ll talk about how the book and comics publishing industries work, what to look for in terms of contracts, agents, editors, copyright, etc.

• 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 5c: Mixing Prose and Comics

‘Small Shen’ was published in December 2012, and sold pretty well. The most interesting thing about the book was actually where it was stocked in the bookstore. Since it was one of Kylie Chan’s books, it ended up being stocked in the ‘Sci-Fi and Fantasy’ section, which was an astonishing revelation. It was astonishing because the book had managed something that not even highly-lauded and multi-award-winning comics could do – get out of the ‘Graphic Novels and Manga’ section of the bookstore.

 

Dymocks on George St is one of the largest bookstores in Sydney, and they stocked “Small Shen” next to James Patterson and Joe Abercrombie – all prose authors.

 

The ‘ghetto-isation’ of the comics medium in bookstores has been something comic artists have been complaining about since the inception of… comics in bookstores.

It has been a long-time dream for people to get their horror comic stocked in the horror section, where the actual horror fans go. Unfortunately, thanks to the way bookstores stock books, your horror comic will always end up in the comics section, where they sit next to Pokemon and Sailormoon on the shelves.

Even with the popularity of comics, this hasn’t changed. Bookstore employees generally loathe seeing comics wander into the prose section. Unfortunately, it makes selling genre comics to genre fans that much harder, because no romance fan would think to look in the ‘comics’ section for their fix.

Yet, ‘Small Shen’ has managed to circumvent this rule. It seems that if you put a bunch of comics and prose together, people think of it as prose, but with pictures. (I personally think of ‘comics-prose’ as comics, but I know others will disagree.)

The other amazing thing about doing comics-prose, is that no one calls my work ‘manga’ anymore. My work is suddenly ‘illustrated prose’ (to people who don’t read comics) even though my drawing style is exactly the same as it was before, and I still consider it comics/manga.

Those who’ve tried to make a living drawing manga-style comics know how significant this is. Manga tanking as a category in bookstores since 2008 can often mean that publishing houses are prejudiced against anything that looks remotely manga – and this has been one of the challenges I mean to address in this series of posts. Either way, it’s been difficult to escape the long arm of history and the stink of the ‘OEL manga’ tag, but it seems that with comics-prose, I could finally do it.

• 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 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.

• 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 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.