Some responses to Satou Shuuhou’s stuff
I thought some famous authors might want to say something about this if I wait a little, but it appears industry people want to stay silent this time as compared to the Raiku incident!
This took longer than I expected, thanks to SF4 and Himegari dungeon. I hope I can do the rest of Satou Shuuhou’s posts tomorrow.
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From http://anond.hatelabo.jp/20090415235800 who claims to be an annonymous manga author going by the name of “Masuda”
Satou Shuuhou’s 700,000 yen per month pay is decided by himself since his studio is acting as the company and he’s in charge.
The daily expenditures or any other expenses are basically completely up to the author, stuff like big TVs, PCs, Air-cons, games, rent, can all be used as expenditure for tax exemption. Even stuff like going on vacations, food, or going to cabarets can be counted as tax deductibles.
There isn’t much where the 700,000 yen that is paid to himself can be used on, basically only the stuff that are purely for personal use like clothes and accessories or gambling.
Being a manga author is definitely a gamble with a very big risk. The editors who are basically the middlemen in this business only run the risk of possibly having less authority within the company when one or two serializations fail when in their hands. And even guys without any real achievements in their hands can make 8,000,000 yen a year, and older guys can be making 10,000,000 yen to 20,000,000 yen a year. That’s not very fair.
But editors are just editors in the end. Manga authors are the guys who get all the attention from the outside world, and manga authors are the guys that get fans.
Editors are jealous of manga authors because of this. Being a manga author is a big gamble, so the possible returns are just as big. If you want to have a stable income you should be a salaryman.
About Satou’s figures about making only 16,000,000 yen a year when being paid on a per page basis, but have 18,000,000 yen in actual expenditures, that’s just an excuse for the tax office.
It sounds normal for him to pay 3,000,000 yen per year to each of the 6 staff, but the total number of pages that he produces in a year is 450 pages. He’s working on a weekly serialization and a weekly magazine would be published 50 times in a year, a normal serialized manga would have about 20 pages per chapter, so somebody working at a normal pace would produce between 800 to 1000 pages in a year. But Satou Shuuhou only produces 450 in a year.
He doesn’t even produce half of what he should be doing, he doesn’t need 6 assistants just to produce 450 pages in a year. The manga industry is always having a lack of manpower, the assistants would be able to find a new job easily even if they get fired, and even more so as they are assistants to Satou Shuuhou, so their skills should be pretty good.
If we calculate the 450 pages divided between 6 people, that’s 75 pages in a year. And if we divde that by 12 months, that would be only 6 pages per month.
So how long does it take for an assistant to finish up a page? It can vary a lot, but even the longest possible time that can be spent to finish a single page would be 24 hours max. Working 8 hours a day, that would be 3 days work. So it would take 9 days to complete 3 pages, that’s already off schedule for a weekly publication, but we’ll ignore that for now. And even that would mean that the assistant is only working for less than 10 days in a month!
Satou is obviously overpaying his staff, but these expenses can be used as a countermeasure against taxes. The deficit is created by himself.
Now about the royalties, Satou complained a lot about the royalties being too low, so lets see how the money from the sales of a tankoubon is usually split.
Author:Publisher:Distributor:Bookstore = 10:60:10:20
Basically the publisher takes 60% of the revenue. I think there’s something wrong with the distributors taking 10% when they usually don’t even do a satisfactory job of getting the book out, but lets not get into that.
The publisher takes 60%, but they’re bearing the costs of production and they also run the risks of incurring additional costs when the books don’t sell and they have keep the extra stock. It’s true that a printing the tankoubon of a popular author is like printing money, but the extra money that comes from this is usually used for operational costs for the magazine. Most people probably already know that magazines are usually sold at a loss, and the reason why the more popular authors can make a fuss over the operation of a magazine is because the popular authors are the reason why the magazines can even be published.
The high pay of an editor is also thanks to the earnings from the manga author. The editors are basically leeching off the popular manga authors, but these manga authors weren’t popular right from the start.
Everybody has to start climbing from the bottom, and when manga authors are starting from zero, they might start serializations that fail badly, or they get to try a one-shot manga, or they might have gotten money from a newcomer award in one of the competitions on magazines.
The publisher is the one that would have to bear the costs for all this.
The money for doing all this would come from the manga authors that were previously popular on the magazine. These people in the magazine staff are making the magazine, selling the magazine, creating a positive branding on the magazine and using this brand power to present the next generation of manga authors, and then they raise the next popular author through all this. It’s like a never ending relay.
To put it bluntly, if Blackjack ni yoroshiku didn’t run in Morning magazine, it wouldn’t have become popular at all. A manga like Tokkou no Shima (which is also by Satou Shuuhou) ran in a minor magazine and it didn’t sell at all.
If royalties are raised, the effects of this would just go on to affect somebody else. It would be okay if a useless editor gets fired, but it’s more likely that the budget for raising newcomer manga authors on the magazine would just go down in priority. Minor magazines are all living on a shoestring, so if you want to get raised to become a good manga author, you should go to one of the major magazines instead.
A successful manga author only becomes successful thanks to the hard work put in by many other people, nothing good will come out of becoming high and mighty after becoming successful. The person who has been passed the baton has the obligation to pass the baton to the next guy, Satou should stop being so selfish.
If Satou wants more money he should work more, if he wants to make money while sleeping around then he should deal in the stock market. But that’s a big gamble too. Satou better not come back since he says that Blackjack ni yoroshiku is probably his last that will be in printed magazines.
Don’t take everything that Satou Shuuhou is saying at face value, there definitely are people that are really poor even while having a regular serialization, but many of them are people who don’t know how to manage their finances properly and just work really slow. Manga can make a lot of money, so please don’t look at manga authors like they’re people that work a lot and get very little in return.
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From http://anond.hatelabo.jp/20090420051525 (continued from previous post)
About the assistant’s pay, 3,000,000 yen is quite little compared to normal jobs, but if you consider that people that are working as an assistant are normally training and getting experience so they can become actual manga authors themselves, it’s only natural that they’re receiving low pay.
There are even people that are working as professional assistants as a career, but there are surprisingly few that actually started out wanting to be a professional assistant. Most pro assistants are usually working for multiple authors at the same time instead of sticking to just one guy, there is no need to depend on just one author for their entire income.
Most of the assistants would be receiving something like 1,000,000 yen from author A, 2,000,000 yen from author B, and another 1,000,000 yen from author C. So even if one author’s serialization ends, they’ve still got income from other authors, and they’d just need to find somewhere else to work at to fill that gap. And they’ll usually find somewhere that needs an assistant fairly quickly.
That is why if an author wants to save on labour costs he can, and the assistants won’t be that badly affected either. Either way, Satou is really using too many assistants for the amount of work that needs to be done. In this case it’s just Satou having problems with his business skills, unlike others who might be really having financial difficulties.
If Satou wants to discuss about money so much, he should be more aware and act like a person who is running a small business. Wanting all the money and acting like he’s the good guy in all this is just impudent. the guys who look at him like a revolutionary reformist for the manga industry aren’t getting it.
These people supporting him, would they buy his work when they’re sold online? 10 yen or 30 yen, it doesn’t really matter, human nature is more impeded by the troublesome process of buying it online as compared to buying it from bookstores or convenience stores that most are used to. He shouldn’t underestimate the power of human habits.
It’s already obvious that magazines will be moving onto the internet in the future, but it’s a different question as to whether Satou’s attempt would work. Anyway when he runs out of money he’ll apologize to somebody and come back again, or start doing manga on cellphone sites, because he has no business sense at all to be able to run a business independently.
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From http://ralf-halfmoon.jugem.jp/?eid=410
1) A manga is not something that belongs only to the author himself
I felt there was something wrong with Shuuhou sensei’s choice to sell chapters that have been published on magazine through his personal website.
Is Blackjack ni yoroshiku a manga that was created from the start to the end only by Satou Shuuhou (and his staff)?
That is impossible. The magazine’s editors must have helped him somewhere along the line. Such as coming up with new ideas on what to write about, or helping to fix up any problems in the roughs.
His hit manga Blackjack ni yoroshiku or Umizaru probably wouldn’t even have been born into this world without help from the editors. Aren’t these projects only born after taking advice or having brainstorming sessions with the editor?
Legally, the rights to the manga belongs to Shuuhou sensei, and he probably can do anything he wants to do with it. And by that legal definition, the manga does belong only to himself and no one else.
But I feel that you can’t ethically claim that the manga only belongs to him, and it feels really bad that he’s doing this to the people at the publisher that have been helping him. If there weren’t any editors that picked him up, Satou would probably have stayed poor and unable to do anything.
2) Can a manga be made without an editor?
From how Shuuhou sensei says that magazines will probably stop asking him for serializations after he starts this online publication thing, it can be assumed that he is still planning to start distributing new original works online after Blackjack ni yoroshiku ends.
But would this be possible?
In the previous point I have mentioned that Umizaru and Blackjack ni yoroshiku would probably not have been born without the help from editors. Would he really be able to create a work that would rival the two manga works that have been mentioned just by himself and his staff?
Personally I don’t think so. Without advice and quality control provided by an editor, he won’t be able to produce work on the same level, as he’s probably already used to the method where he works together with an editor.
There are examples of manga that have been made on a personal level that have become really popular like Tonari no 801-chan and Hetalia, so it’s not impossible for an individual to produce a hit manga on his own. But it’s different in that these guys have been working alone all this time, as compared to Satou who has been working together with an editor all this time and is planning to switch to working alone.
Satou is good at doing manga based on society, so interviews and gathering data is very important, but he would probably have problems doing this without using the authority of the publisher. Satou has complained about how guys from the publisher have had some problems in the data that they have collected, but an individual would probably not even have been allowed to collect any of the data at all. The publisher might not have done a satisfactory job, but if you weren’t even allowed to collect any data then nothing can be done at all.
3) Can online distribution be commercially successful?
The annonymous author Masuda had said that Blackjack ni yoroshiku would not have sold as much as it did if it didn’t run on Morning magazine. So just how many people would read an online manga which has had no publicity and is being distributed on a personal site?
Being published on a magazine that is being circulated across the entire nation gives a lot of publicity. The guys reading Satou’s site, the mass media writing about Satou’s recent decision, were all visiting his site because he is currently holding a serialization in a weekly manga magazine. Just how many people would still continue to visit his site if he backs away from the front lines of the manga industry?
He lists on his diary that older works would go for 10 yen per chapter, and 30 yen for newer chapters. He currently makes 16,000,000 yen per year right now just from the amount that he is being paid per page by the publisher. That means he needs to sell the new chapters 533,333 times to make the same amount. Meaning he needs to sell each new chapter 10,670 times if he makes 50 chapters in a year. Is this a realistic number? It’s a very small number compared to the tankoubon sales, but that’s because there’s Shogakukan or Kodansha backing it up. And on top of that, online users seldomly want to part with their money while online.
4) Will online distribution bring any merits to the users?
If Satou stops serializing in magazines and starts selling chapters online instead, the quality of the manga will definitely change. It’ll probably have a more personal touch to it while losing some of the business-like catchiness and the entertainment value might be lessened, as the editor that would control all this would be gone.
Whether this is good or bad for the reader would depend on the reader, but a large portion of his current readers would probably leave, though other new readers might get attracted instead.
On the other hand, the prices that Satou has suggested does look attractive on the end of the user. As long as readers give up the wish to have a book that they can hold in their hands, this new system will probably satisfy both the reader and the author. But I really doubt that this system will work…
5) Conclusion
Honestly, I don’t think Satou is doing all this just because he wants more money. He’s probably honestly pissed off at the current system that the manga industry is running on. It’s okay to be angry like that because he has the right to do so.
But what I’m trying to say is that even if he has the right to be angry, he should not be so self centered in his emphasis. And, it’s not humanely right to be forgetting all the favors that others have been doing for him.
There are people who have been bashing the posts that were mentioned on top saying that it might be written by an editor, but it doesn’t really matter who it was that wrote the post, what really matters is the contents.
