Tag: romance

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!

BentoComics.com – The Two-Dollar Deal

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Wahaay! Two more stories until I end my weekly run of uploading comics to Bento Comics, and this week is a 2006 romance story I did for “Generation” anthology, only 8 pages long. It’s been up on this LJ before, but here it is once again for those who missed it the first time around.

Rundown: Bento Comics is a new website that permits users to read and compile their own short story anthologies. It then prints the book at a printing company called Lulu, and delivers the personalised book to your door. A new publishing model, if you will.

Short Story of the Week: Romance in a tacky two-dollar store. Can it happen?

E-book: Available on the right-hand side of this page, where it says “Ebook Available in .epub!”. It’s DRM-free, and Epub can be read on all platforms EXCEPT the Kindle. I’d like to charge USD$0.99 for this story (like iTunes), but the system isn’t yet in place so you can download it for free.

If you don’t have an e-reader like the iPad or Nook, you an download e-readers for your PC – here’s 2 programs you can download: The Adobe Acrobat eReader, and the Barnes and Noble eReader.

 

The Two Dollar Deal

Click here to read on Bentocomics.com!

 

I wrote this story after discovering that a co-worker at a video-game company I worked at also worked part-time at a two-dollar store. It was quite surprising – she used to bring these tacky yellow rubber chickens to work as a gag, and I used to wonder where she got so many of them. But then I knew. Thinking of all that junk in a two-dollar store prompted me to write this story, which is still one of my favourites.

 

BentoComics.com – Message To You

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Hi all! As per last week, when I posted up my entry about Bento Comics, I promised I would post a new short story every weekend for 2 months. So here’s my next short story, Message To You, which is a cute 4-page silent romance perfect for Valentine’s Day (or it would be, if it weren’t already April).

Rundown: Bento Comics is a new website that permits users to read and compile their own short story anthologies. It then prints the book at a printing company called Lulu, and delivers the personalised book to your door. A new publishing model, if you will.

Short Story of the Week: A cute, 4-page Valentine story about a boy taking a walk in the countryside, and encountering a… balloon. Will You Be My Valentine?

E-book: Available on the right-hand side of this page, where it says “Ebook Available in .epub!”. It’s DRM-free, and Epub can be read on all platforms EXCEPT the Kindle. I’d like to charge USD$0.99 for this story (like iTunes), but the system isn’t yet in place so you can download it for free.

If you don’t have an e-reader like the iPad or Nook, you an download e-readers for your PC – here’s 2 programs you can download: The Adobe Acrobat eReader, and the Barnes and Noble eReader.

 

Message To You

Click to Read on BentoComics.com!

This story was drawn on a whim in 2006, not anywhere near Valentine’s Day. Still, I like these two characters a lot (they don’t have names… “Boy” and “Girl”?), and it would be interesting to revisit them in their “every day” life for another short story. I’ve already posted this story on this blog when it first came out 4 years ago, but if you’re new to my blog since then, you may not have read it yet. Years later and it’s still one of my favourites. Ofcourse, feedback welcome.