Forum - View topicHey, Answerman! - Shounenmageddon
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aereus
Posts: 576 |
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My forehead hurts from facepalming. Who do you think the store gets the manga from? It doesn't come out of thin air. The publisher sends a print run to a distributor whose job it is to forward copies to all the individual stores. And if their system works similarly to the US one -- if copies remain unsold the stores can return them to the distributor where they are marked as used and destroyed. They are charged back to the publisher. tl;dr -- The publisher is selling the manga through to the stores via distributors. If they aren't selling, they will stop carrying the product, thereby the publisher makes no money. Authors are people, not faceless corporations. Many even have families to support. Touching on what someone else said -- manga authors, as a whole, are not rich. For every Tite Kubo releasing Bleach, there are 100+ manga authors that toil away in obscurity for little pay. It's hard work, with a demanding schedule that requires you to consistently produce. Writers Block? Too bad. Feeling sick? Too bad. You wonder why there are so many stories of manga authors going on hiatus for sickness -- they overwork themselves. Your favorite manga, especially if its a more niche title, works with a handful of people. Sometimes even out of their own apartment. I forget which manga I was reading recently where the author drew up a sketch of his apartment. He had a tiny room where the bed was walled in on 3 sides, and about 2ft of clearance at the door to get in. The rest of the tiny Japanese apartment was working space for 4 assistants squeezed in there. The author of Watashi ga Motenai no wa... said on her twitter that she receives a small advance per volume, and $1 per copy royalty. I think she sold somewhere around a few thousand copies. And she works with one other person, so of course part of that money goes to him. (And think of the previous example where he's paying 4 people to help) |
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agila61
 Posts: 3213 Location: NE Ohio |
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Yes, an important part of how the manga serials sell hundreds of pages of content for such a low price is that their page rates often do not even cover the cost of assistants ~ the royalties from tankoubon sales are essential for a manga-ka to make a living. Even if you consider the pay as including a virtual lottery ticket, with a 1 in a thousand chance of hitting the solid upper middle class income of the manga-ka of a strong best-selling series and the 1 in a million chance of hitting it rich with a lucrative, merchandise rich mega-hit ... it still a profession of very long hours for very low pay. And royalties are royalties ~ international distribution pays royalties too, whether its print or digital. The North American market may not be critical to the survival of the manga industry ... indeed, at this point likely not as large as the French market ... but if you are buying a niche title, you can be sure that the royalty income is appreciated whether it comes from the Japanese printing, an overseas translated publication, or some other means of legit distribution. |
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aereus
Posts: 576 |
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Yeah I know with the case of the lady working on the Motenai manga, she was floored by how much overseas support she had. So I think if you can find the twitter name for any of your favorite authors, leave them words of encouragement. They would probably be very flattered to find out they have fans outside of Japan. Even if you can't stumble anything out in Japanese, they can use machine translation to get your point across.
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animalia555
Posts: 467 |
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personally my problem with season legth adaptations of manga is just that, they are SEASON length. In order to get a story arc or two of manga to fit into a 13, 26, or 52 episode TV show they often have to cut out important parts of the story. A set show length is also no garrantee that the show will be filler free, as the producers sometimes enlongate other parts of the story in oredr to get it to fit properly within the alloted amount of episodes. I am not saying i like all of the filler we get with long runners either. I personally think the ideal would be to decide which story arcs you want to animate, figure out how many episodes you wlll need, and charter enough air space for precicesly that many episodes even if it is an unique number of episodes like say 34. Unfortuantly to the best of limited knowledge that way of doing things would not be economical in the current anime industry.
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