Canned Dogs

Blackjack ni yoroshiku author Satou Shuuhou has been writing a lot about the manga industry recently. Which kinda led up to that announcement he would sell his chapters online through his website. Anyway this post only makes up half of the stuff that he has written, and it’s probably already the longest post I’ve ever written here.

Anyway, the stuff that he has written about how he feels that publishers are completely exploiting manga authors has been both positively and negatively received, so it’s up to how you want to look at it. I’ve tried to keep the nuances in the choice of words that he picks to describe some of the workings in the industry.

I’ll probably do the rest… sometime soon. Also some annonymous manga author wrote a response to Satou’s stuff which disagrees with him that I’d want to write about too, just to show the entire thing from a different point of view. There’s too much to post about!

Also if you can finish reading this incredibly long post in a single sitting you’re a real hero.

—

This was when Satou Shuuhou first started weekly serialization:

When Satou Shuuhou first started Umizaru, he was being paid at 10,000 yen per page, and he does 20 pages per chapter, so he basically gets 800,000 yen per month, with one chapter every week.

Costs per month:
Tax: 80,000 yen
Monthly pay for 3 assistants: 470,000 yen total
Monthly food expenses for the staff: 100,000 yen
Cost of drawing materials and reference materials every month: 100,000 yen
Rent for the studio: 70,000 yen
Utilities bill and other misc expenses: 50,000 yen

After deducting his own living expenses and all that, he makes a loss of 200,000 yen a month.

It was normal to work 20 hours a day, and the studio was basically also where he lived. He had saved approximately 2,000,000 yen before he started serialization, but by the time the first tankoubon was released, his savings were already down to 70,000 yen.

It’s actually possible to borrow money from the editorial department, but he didn’t want to do so as it would become a scenario where it’s like he is drawing manga just to pay his debt to the editors.

The editor told him many times that when the tankoubon is released, there would no longer be a problem as he would get all his money back, but there wasn’t a contract that ensured that they would release a tankoubon in the first place, there is no gurantee that they would release one.

There are cases where popular manga would suddenly end due to change in chief editor which changed the direction of the magazine. There are also cases where manga which the author has already drawn is rejected due to various reasons and will not be published in the magazine, but in these cases, the publisher will still pay for the pages that were done.

Satou Shuuhou is currently on a contract with Shogakukan which clearly states how much he is supposed to be paid per page and how long the serialization will last. He says that he is probably the first manga author who actually got a contract with everything stated clearly like that.

After Umizaru ran for 6 months, Satou summed up his courage and went to ask for a raise in the amount he is paid per page. He described it as an act that requires a lot of courage, as he would be finished if the editor just plainly answers that “oh, then we don’t need you anymore”. The request for a raise was rejected in the end, but he wasn’t told to leave or anything.

But the current climate right now is completely different from 10 years ago, and the market isn’t anywhere as good as back then. Most publishers have reduced the amount that is paid to newcomers by approximately 1,000 yen per page.

Magazines have become very bad recently as a certain weekly manga magazine makes a loss of 20 million yen with every issue sold. A weekly publication would publish about 50 magazines in a year, so that sums up to 1 billion yen in losses per year, and these losses are covered by tankoubon sales.

There are some magazines that are actually selling their magazine as a profit, but more than 90% of the magazines are handling heavy losses with every publication.

Satou Shuuhou says that the business model is obviously completely broken right now, so he’s getting ready for the day when printed magazines cease to exist.

—

Recent years:

Shin Blackjack ni yoroshiku: 35,000 yen per page
Tokkou no shima: 25,000 yen per page

4koma usually gets 10,000 yen to 20,000 yen per strip (some people may get lower too), the number of pages they get on a magazine is usually quite low, and they usually completely spend an idea within one strip as compared to a story manga which can go for 3 or 4 chapters with one idea. On the other hand, it is possible to do a 4koma manga alone, while a story manga usually needs assistants to help out and incurs the risk of additional costs.

In cases where there’s a storywriter working together with the artist to produce a manga, the storywriter gets paid for writing the story on top of the amount that is paid to the artist. However, if the artist is writing the story and doing the art at the same time, he doesn’t get paid for the storywriting.

Satou Shuuhou asked if he could pretend to have a storywriter called Satou and have an artist called Shuuhou so he can get double the amount per page, but it didn’t work. According to the editors, the extra pay to the storywriter is a bonus from the publisher, they don’t really need to pay that money.

The manga author gets 10% in royalties from every manga sold, and this number will not change depending on sales. On the other hand, the publisher makes more money on a per book basis if sales are good. Satou tried to demand for higher royalties when sales are good since the publisher gets more money per book anyway, but he was rejected with the reason that the author should be happy with a fixed 10% royalty as he doesn’t have to worry about the risks of having tons of leftover stock if the books don’t sell.

10% royalties is calculated on the amount that the book is sold for, so for a 500 yen book the author gets 50 yen each, the royalties are technically not based on the number of books sold, but the number of books printed, stuff about reprints will also come in later, but it gets more complicated there.

No matter how many books are sold, the author only gets 50 yen each, but for the publisher, the more books that are sold, the more profits they would make per book, as production costs and other misc costs go down when dealing with larger numbers.

—

Satou Shuuhou currently draws about 450 pages of manga in a year, making about 16 million yen (US$160,000) from just the pages alone. On top of that, he gets 150,000 yen per chapter in project fees for Shin Blackjack ni yoroshiku. It costs 18 million yen a year for him to hire 6 assistants, so with everything added up it balances out to zero.

However with the costs for drawing materials, gathering content material, and other running costs, there isn’t enough money to cover everything.

He is often told that he draws too slow or is using too many assistants, but he feels the 18 million yen is the minimum that he can go for the assistants and him to live a normal life, as the assistants make 3 million yen per year, which is slightly lower than the average salary man in his 20s.

There are a lot of manga authors that underpay their assistants while forcing them to work long hours. Satou had also helped many authors in the past as an assistant, and the cheapest one was paying him approximately 120 yen per hour.

When Satou was running Umizaru he had only 3 assisants, and he couldn’t afford to pay them bonuses too. The only reason why he managed to keep the manga running on a weekly serialization is because he completely threw his private life away, and for two and a half years he did not rest and spent all his time on the manga. Half of the backgrounds were drawn personally by himself.

Blackjack ni yoroshiku and Shin Blackjack ni yoroshiku has sold more than 10 million copies combined so far, at 50 yen per book, this results in a huge sum, but half of this amount received disappears due to taxes. And then after deducting other remaining costs the rest of the money goes to his working studio which functions as a company.

At his studio, the staff will get paid 100% even if the manga is on hiatus for an entire year, as any hiatus that would occur would be due to a fault on his end and not the assistants.

As the “director” of the studio, he pays himself 700,000 yen (US$7,000) per month, which he says is probably about 2/3 of the monthly pay of an editor at one of the big publishers.

—

It costs about 150 yen, including the royalties to the author, to print a 500 yen tankoubon. Satou has the full details for the costs involved for printing a certain tankoubon.

Selling price: 515 yen
Print run: 50,291
Total sales: 17,352,910 yen

Paper costs: 1,725,210 yen
Printing plate cost: 12,800 yen
Letterpress cost: 1,100 yen
Photocomposition cost: 28,700 yen
Printing cost: 853,705 yen
Binding cost; 1,081,256 yen
Processing and cost for supplement materials: 201,629 yen
Manuscript fee: 8,000 yen
Royalties: 2,584,837 yen
Labour costs: 989,682 yen

Total: 7,486,919 yen

150.30 yen per book

The costs can change a lot depending on the amount of books that are being printed, the above is for 50,000 books. When printing 100,000 books, the printing plate cost, letterpress cost, the photocomposition cost, and the manuscript fee will stay the same, and the labour costs won’t be too different. So when the costs of printing 100,000 books is calculated with the above factors included, the total cost comes down to 12,490,016 yen, or 125 yen per book.

So basically:

Print 50,000 books - cost price 150 yen per book
Print 100,000 books - cost price 125 yen per book

The profits that the publisher makes per book is completely different depending on how much was in the first print run, but the extra profits go straight to the publisher, and the author still only gets the same standard amount per book.

Blackjack ni yoroshiku sells approximately 1 million copies per volume, so there’s approximately a 50,000,000 yen difference in extra profits due to the difference in printing costs, as compared to a book that does a 50,000 print run.

However as the author, Satou Shuuhou says that after 13 volumes, the publisher has probably made an extra 600 million yen, but none of it goes to him.

Since profits go up, Satou demanded for increased royalties, but it’s fixed at 10% and they will not change it.

Satou tried searching for possible ways to do self-publishing, but he found out that if he prints 1,000 books, it would cost 1,200 yen per book. If he prints 100,000 books at once, he can’t possibly sell all 100,000 books, as the bookstores will not be willing to put his books on their shelves, and he doesn’t have any business skills. He doesn’t have the money to hire people to be able to do these things for him, and of course, he doesn’t have the money to pull any ads either.

Even if he can get that done and have bookstores willing to sell his book, he has the problem of distribution. He can’t drive a truck across the whole of Japan to get his book out to all the bookstores.

Since he can’t do all this, does this mean he has to listen to everything that the publisher says? Is it better to just quit making manga altogether?

The current relationship between the manga author and the publisher is that the authors are like the subcontractors, they’re not on equal standing.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under Manga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.