Tag: sister holmes

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!

Sister Holmes: Dectective Nun

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Hi all, I’m mid-way through inking Odd Thomas 3 (while watching Colbert Nation and making squiggly lines from laughing while inking), and there’s an interview with me up on the Graphic Novel Reporter, by Danica Davidson. Thanks, Danica and GNR.

Today, good news if you’re attending Sakura Con 2011 in Seattle this weekend. The BentoComics people have a table there and at least two anthologies for sale, the first a collection of Sherlock Holmes related stories by many of BentoComics’ contributing artists, including myself.

Update: So popular was this anthology that it sold out completely at Sakura Con on Day 1!

I contributed a 16-page story in the manner of a Sherlock Holmes story, except that it’s about Sister Holmes, Detective Nun. Because I looked it up online, and the only badass nun we had in comics was Warrior Nun Areala, so obviously what we needed was a cool, logical nun who solves baffling mysteries with rational deduction. If you see this anthology at Sakura Con, may the Power of Christ compel you to buy it (and also the second anthology, which I outline below).

 

Anthology cover for Sherlocke Holmes

 

Above is the cover (drawn by Myung), and you can read the Sister Holmes story by clicking the cover page below.

 

Sister Holmes: Detective Nun
Click to read on Bentocomics.com!

 

I’m not sure what it was about the “Write a Sherlock Holmes Story” request, that made me want to re-write Sherlock Holmes as a nun. It may be because of all the “re-imaginings” of Sherlock Holmes lately. You have Movie Sherlock, which “re-imagines” Sherlock as a man of action. You have Young Sherlock Holmes, Modern-Day Sherlock Holmes, and Steampunk Sherlock Holmes… all of which amounts to something like a change of scenery. If they’re re-imagining Sherlock Holmes, they’re not re-imagining him enough.

Apart than that, there’s also the wonderful original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, who I recently re-read with fresh eyes and new appreciation. The first thing that struck me about the Holmes stories is how perfect they are. They are all fairly different, yet formulaic enough for people to be entertained, but not alienated. They are the reason why Sherlock Holmes is one of the most widely recognised literary archetypes in the world, and continues to be. What can I add to something so perfect, so archetypal?

So I subverted it. That’s the only way I felt I could put an interesting spin on it – the stories all have to be good mystery stories, but the bit players are up for some fun. So Sister Holmes is female and a nun, and Father Watson, while not in this story, is extremely impressed by her powers of observation and deduction. The two live in a small chapel in 221 Baker St, two doors down from the Ye Olde London Secret Sisterhood of Cake Decorators. She is no joke, folks.

 
 

Queenie Chan Anthology – 2000-2010: Then there’s also this anthology for sale at the Bento table, which is a 150-page book containing a collection of my 10 best short stories drawn over the past decade, 9 of which are available to read on my website. Readers and fans have asked me for a long time where they can buy a collection of my short stories, and now you can, in book form.

 

Queenie Chan Short Stories - 2000-2010
Click to Buy this on Lulu.com!

 

It’s a print-on-demand book, so you can go to this page at Lulu to order a copy, if you can’t make it to Sakura Con. I’ll do a more detailed post on this on a later date, but for now, I’ll just mention that it’s there and available.