Blackjack ni yoroshiku manga to be posted online
The Blackjack ni yoroshiku author Satou Shuuhou has announced that he will be putting up chapters from his manga on his site a month after they’re published in Big Comic Spirits magazine. Visitors will have to pay a small fee to read the manga on his site.
The thing about this is that magazines are paying authors to buy the rights to publish their manga on their magazine, but the rights to the original manga still belongs to the author, so as the author he can technically do whatever he wants with his manga after it has been published.
He’s trying to find a new business model where authors don’t need to rely on publishers, and he wants to see if it is possible for a manga author to produce manga while maintaining a consistent level of quality and speed without having to rely on a publisher.
He believes his current serializations will probably be the last of his work that will be published on magazines, partly because magazines will probably stop asking him for new serializations after this.
The date when he will start posting his manga online or the cost of each chapter has not been announced yet.
Via: Yahoo news
He has been writing a lot of stuff about the manga industry on his site over the past 2 weeks, mainly about money, manga authors not getting a big enough share of the money, and… other money matters. I was going to post about his stuff more than a week ago but that post has been half written in draft form and untouched forever because the post got too long! Amazing!
April 15th, 2009 at 5:44 am
micropayments????
INFINITE CANVAS?????
April 15th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Does anyone know how much do the printed manga-reading audience and the online manga-reading audience overlap? I mean, does anyone know if a large enough amount of people would buy an online-only manga? Could it be profitable right now? I am under the impression that Japan could move relatively easy from printed distribution to online distribution, but I’m not sure this is right (or if it is, how fast are they moving in that direction).
Also, I know cost plays an important role, but just how accesible would this be? I mean, do the Japanese read comics in their cell-phones? Or what would be the preferred method of access? PC’s? Some Kindle-like device?
Just wondering.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I don’t know how to answer some of those questions directly, but many publishers have been starting online magazines the past years, like GanGan Online, Flex Comix, Ultra Jump Egg, MiChao! etc. I don’t know how well their tankoubon ended up selling, but Hyakko which can be read online for free on Flex Comix had managed to get its own anime.
We also have sites like Yahoo Comics now which allow you to buy entire vols for viewing online, but I don’t know exactly how well they’re doing right now either.
Cellphone comic are starting to be really profitable according to some magazine editors, with some of the more popular titles targeted at older males producing tens of millions of yen in profit from downloads.
But the difference here as compared to these other online comics is that Satou is trying envisioning a way to publish manga online because he thinks 10% in royalties is too little, so he wants to see if it is possible to do it on a personal basis without going through any publishers, and make a living off it while still maintaining the same quality and weekly schedule.
That obviously won’t work for a no-name guy, but it might work for Satou because he’s already famous anyway.
April 15th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
He should contact some scanlators and pay them to make a translation. Maybe he could some of the international manga money.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
If you look online for manga, this is what happens:
1. People pay to view the manga online.
2. Eventually someone will take those manga images and post them online for free.
3. People stop paying for the manga, realizing that they can get the same quality for FREE online elsewhere.
4. Mangaka is sad, maybe.
Of course, this happens with magazines anyways, when people scan the pages. But when comparing scans to the actual magazine, some people (or noobs w/o computers) simply want to buy the magazine for collector’s sake or sheer fun of it, and therefore actual profit is accumulated. But when it comes down to online manga, it’s pretty much the same quality and experience, free or paid.
April 16th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Thanks for the reply, Zepy.
I asked those questions mostly because I thought that there might be some consumer habits that might make it difficult to make a profit, even for a well-known artist (of course, fame gives him a better shot at it).
All in all, I hope he succeeds.
April 16th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Now, when he says 10% in royalties, is he talking about 10% of net, or 10% of cover price?
If it’s cover price, 10% is actually pretty good. In the US, that number tends to start at 7%…
April 17th, 2009 at 7:04 am
Hmm so uhh, how do all these webcomic folks make money again?
April 17th, 2009 at 8:11 am
>Simon Jones
I’m not exactly sure about the difference between the two terms, but if a book is sold at 500 yen, the author gets 10% of that, so it’s 50 yen.
>soloista
They sell the tankoubon in printed form. Most printed magazines are sold at a loss, and both the publishers and the authors only make a profit when the tankoubon goes on sale. So when they stop selling printed magazines, they take a chunk of those losses away. You can’t read the comic again online after like a month after the chapter is published online, so people are motivated to buy the manga that they like.
There are also digital sales for tankoubon, but printed books are probably still their main source of profit.
April 17th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
Ah, thanks.
Had he only been receiving 10% of net profit (gross minus production costs), that certainly would have been criminal. But 10% of cover price is quite fair… the print publisher’s cut is likely somewhere in the tweens too, and that’s before ancillary costs are figured into the equation.
Of course, he’s perfectly entitled to feel that 10% is too little. But it’s not as if the other 90% is simply disappearing into a vortex… he’d be foregoing the collective marketing support of traditional publication, the well established distribution channels of traditional retail fronts, and the inherent value of print that still appeals to a large number of consumers. It’s a tradeoff that’s not going to work for everyone…
May 5th, 2009 at 7:40 am
I don’t see this going well, for me the main reason to pay for manga is to simply have it in my hands and not having to be tethered to a computer or internet connection while reading it, take those two things away and leave in paying for it and I’m pretty sure most people will just go read it for free elsewhere.
June 9th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Very nice information. Thanks for this.
August 17th, 2009 at 9:29 am
I can see overseas Japanese as a possible market, but apart from that I’m having a hard time figuring out who would pay to read the Japanese manga online.