Table of Contents #00. Prologue #01. Will manga exist 10 years from now? #02. Just what are manuscript fees, anyway? #03. What kind of a life is a life lived off royalties? #04. A million-seller hit with 220 million yen of profit in a single year...what does that turn my yearly salary into? #05. Printing 1 million copies myself would make me a quicker 100 million. #06. You know, I'm starting to think I should just die along with paper media. #07. I'll make my own homepage, release my own manga on it, and let all my readers purchase it there. #08. I haven't had a single meeting with an editor for several years now. #09. A relationship between mangaka and readers without a publisher in between. #10. Honestly, doing online comics is hard. #11. Those books are the publisher's products, not yours. #12. OK, so how much will it actually cost? #13. Sato Shuho on Web is open. But is it making money? #14. You may laugh, but I'm really trying to change the world here. #15. Marching toward 'Manga on Web' #16. Epilogue #17. Credits 1 Prologue In February, 2009, I started an e-book site called Sato Shuho on Web. Currently, we're in the middle of a slump in the publishing world. Manga magazines keep taking breaks and ceasing publications, and bookstores are disappearing from our streets. Every year, big publishers find themselves billions of yen in debt, and the industry itself is continuing a 14-year streak of dropping sales. With every new publication, manga magazines and publishers gain tens of millions of yen of increased debt, and so they're constantly scrambling to fill those holes through tankoubon (pocket-sized paperback) volume sales. Right now, if you go into a bookstore you can still buy books, and there's no way every single bookstore in the country would disappear. However, many changes, both visible and invisible, have begun in various places. While the publishing world deteriorates, digital media is developing, and according to a report by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the ratio of cell phone to household was 95.6%, while computers were at 85.9%. In the previous year, the number of people who have ever used the internet was 90,910,000 people, and the regular usage ratio was 75.3%. In 2010, with e-book hardware like the Kindle and iPad, Japan finally started getting on board, and this year came to be called "E-Book Year 1" (as a reference to Japan's year cataloging system). Nowadays, seeing people looking at their cell phones on the train is a normal occurrence, and it's much harder to find someone reading a manga magazine. Is this phenomenon merely a slump in the publishing world? Or is it the end of paper culture? As a mangaka with over ten years in the industry, I couldn't help but feel an slight uneasiness in my gut. "Will manga even exist in the next decade?" 2 Prologue At first it was just an offhand question. But for the sake of the argument, let's say these changes in the publishing world do signal the end of paper culture. Where does that leave manga? The option to cast in your lot with a publisher still exists, but that may not be the only option anymore. What we take for granted now may not be around forever. And so, I decided to do an experiment. 3 Will manga exist 10 years from now? There's a very scary term that exists in the manga industry called "serialization poverty." It refers to the first time a mangaka gets a serialization. You work real hard to draw it all, but after half a year, it still hasn't gotten popular, so it gets canceled. Then all you have left is a big debt. Your serialization has led you to poverty. When a single manga is serialized in a magazine, a mangaka receives profit known as "manuscript fees" paid by the publisher, according to the number of pages of the manuscript. Aside from the work necessary to draw the actual manga, data also needs to be collected, the script needs to be thought up, and then the actual panels of the manga need to be planned. There are various steps to the process, but no money is paid out for any of them. Mangaka pay the rent for the office, pay their art staff, buy their materials and pay for everything else necessary for manga production using the manuscript fee. When Umizaru(*1) first began its serialization, I received 10,000 yen for each manuscript page. *1: "Umizaru (Sea Monkeys)" - The author's first serialization, chronicling the work of coast guards. It ran from 1999 to 2001 in Weekly Young Sunday (Shogakukan). It was made into a drama twice by NHK, and then into a film and another drama by Fuji TV. 12 volumes in all. 4 Will manga exist 10 years from now? 20 pages were the standard for a weekly serialization, so I received 800,000 yen per month. I don't think it was that bad a salary for someone as young as I was at the time. But as I just explained, creating a manga requires a lot of different funds. Let's break down what it actually cost to make Umizaru. First, the manuscript fee is deposited into my bank account from the publisher, minus 10% for withholding tax. That leaves me with 720,000 yen. At the time, I didn't have my own company, and I was employing an outer art staff (*2) to draw a portion of the art. That cost 5 470,000, leaving me with 250,000. In this industry, it's custom for the mangaka to pay for the meals of the art staff, and that cost about 100,000, leaving me with 150,000. *2: Outer Art Staff - They come from the outside, but we actually worked together. As this is a sole proprietorship, I can't hire "employees." The materials and data cost about 100,000, leaving me with 50,000. The apartment/office that I both lived and worked in cost 70,000 for rent, leaving me with -20,000. Add in utilities and sundry expenses, and it becomes -70,000. These are all just rough estimates, but the manuscript fee alone clearly leaves me in the red. And this is excluding all personal life expenses. 6 Will manga exist 10 years from now? I pay for my own personal expenses, but then there are times when I want to treat my staff to BBQ and such, so no matter how I dice it, I always get about 200,000 yen in the hole each month. Incidentally, you can't find a very big room for 70,000 yen a month in Tokyo. My room was comprised of six tatami mats, where I would work 20 hours a day, day and night, which obviously earned me quite a bit of complaints from the neighbors. It was an old, wooden apartment building, so the walls were thin, and late at night we could hear people loudly having sex next door. And for some reason, whenever that couple would finish their business, they'd always hum "Stand By Me." (*3) Whenever I hear that song now, I recall those days. I suppose it's etched in my memory now. *3: "Stand By Me" - A famous song by Ben E. King. Midst all that, my staff and I drew manga without sleep or rest. During that period, I used the money I had saved up from working. I had about 2 million yen in my bank account. 7 When I released my first tankoubon volume, I was down to 70,000 yen. If I had asked the editors that were working on my serialization, maybe they would have lent me some money. But then I would be drawing manga to pay back my loan, and I wouldn't be able to look at them with a straight face anymore. Editors usually say things like, "Once you get your volumes out, you'll get royalties, so don't worry about it," but we didn't even have a publishing contract signed when I started the serialization. Just because a mangaka starts a serialization in a magazine, (*4) it doesn't necessarily mean they'll be able to put out a tankoubon. *4: Comics published for the fiscal year of 2010 - In 2010 there were 11,977 comics published, but 8,851 of those were magazines, and 3,126 were actual books. The comics market in 2010 made 2.3% less profit than the previous year - 409,100,000,000 yen - but comic volumes sold 1.8% more, making it the first time profits recovered in five years. 8 Will manga exist 10 years from now? The reality of the situation is that published volumes are a result of popularity. Furthermore, in this industry, there aren't even writing contracts made prior to the publishing contracts. I also often hear about popular manga suddenly ending when new editor-in-chiefs come into office and change editing policies. Editors will also often keep a new mangaka's manuscript from appearing in a magazine for other unrelated reasons. In those cases, the publisher will pays the manuscript fees, but this sort of situation has become so common that there's a word for it now: "dead on purchase." Basically, this is a world of spoken promises, without anything ensured through actual documents.