Canned Dogs

More manga industry stuff from Satou’s blog.

When I previously said “tomorrow” I meant “his site went down for the weekend and I never started on it till a week later”.

There’s still a lot more things that he wrote. How much does he want to write anyway! I’ll do the rest… tomorrow(?).

Related:
Blackjack ni yoroshiku manga to be posted online
Satou Shuuhou on manga stuff (part 1?)
Some responses to Satou Shuuhou’s stuff

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When Satou Shuuhou tried to set up his on publishing company

Satou Shuuhou doesn’t actually think that a manga author is greater than an editor, but he wishes to be treated as an equal. So if that’s the case, why not just simply set up a publishing company?

Satou had thought of setting up a publishing company 3 years ago when negotiations about raising the royalties were not going well with the publisher.

When a manga becomes a tankoubon and reaches the hands of the reader, most of the time it’ll have to go through three dealers, first is the publisher, second the distributor, and third the bookstore.

Even if somebody sets up a publishing company and publishes his own books, if he can’t get any deals going with the distributors, the books won’t get in bookstores at all.

The role of the distributor is to take orders from the bookstores and send the books to all the bookstores across the nation.

In order to start dealing with a distributor, an International Standard Book Number (ISBN) first needs to be obtained from the Japan ISBN agency, then you need to request to set up a trading account with the distributor that you want to deal with, and only when that is approved can the publisher finally start dealing with the particular distributor. However, the requirements for a request for an account is quite hard to meet, and most newcomers will not be able to meet the requirements.

We’re in the age where publishing is in recession. There are many publishing companies that already have business relationships with distributors are having trouble financially and there are quite a number that are lying dormant. Satou has considered buying up one of these companies.

However, even if he buys a dormant company, he needs to be regularly publishing books if he sets up a publishing company.

Depending on the number of titles being published and the number of books printed for circulation every month, the price per book can be very different when dealing with the distributor. And if there are too little titles being published, the distributors won’t even deal with the publisher.

No matter how hard Satou tries, 4 books a year is probably the best he can do.

So would it be possible to have an editorial department and publish 10 to 20 books that would sell fairly well every month? That would not be possible to do alone. Would Satou have the ability to get people to work for him? Would he have the power to get authors to come to his company? Even if he can get all that done, he won’t have time to draw manga anymore.

The idea to set up a publishing company collapsed fairly quickly.

Three years ago was also a time when the market for manga distribution via cellphones was growing very rapidly.

Previously when you get on a train you could usually spot somebody reading a manga magazine, but this was slowly replaced with people who are instead looking at their cellphones while on the train. It was possible to read comics on your cellphone and pay for it through the telephone bills.

Companies dealing with distribution of cellphone contents have been trying very hard to get ahold of new content. And there have been many companies that approached Satou saying that they wish to distribute his manga through cellphones.

This was during a period when Blackjack ni yoroshiku had just ended the psychiatry arc and the manga was in hiatus after Satou’s negotiations with the editorial department had broken down, and he was approached by a company asking if he would be willing to start serialization again but this time on cellphones.

And they had a very good offer too, he would probably have received more than twice the amount per page as compared to what he would receive from a magazine serialization, and he was told that if a tankoubon was released he would receive 15% in royalties.

But he wasn’t very attracted to the offer.

This was because Satou liked the paper medium and believed that manga had to be read on paper, and was not comfortable with manga on cellphones or on a digital medium.

At the same time, there are “large scale new used book stores” that manage to sell used books of newly published titles all over the country, and manga cafes that provide tens of thousands of manga free for customers to read, and the increasing popularity of these businesses is contributing to the drop in paper tankoubon sales.

A theory is that the combined powers of large scale new old book stores and manga cafes have made tankoubon sales drop by more than 30 percent.

One manga author even referred to these businesses as leeching off the success of others, but these businesses are probably here to stay as there is nothing illegal about them.

It is only natural that consumers will flow towards what is cheaper and more convenient.

Self publishing is no good, Satou can’t set up a publishing company. Magazines aren’t going to last much longer, Satou doesn’t like cellphones, and tankoubon sales are diminishing due to used book stores and manga cafes. It’s like a sinking ship.

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We’ve previously said that the standard rate for royalties for manga tankoubon is 10%, but sometimes the authors for books that aren’t selling well may get 8% or 9%, and when the manga is done in cooperation by a storywriter and a manga artist, it is split 5% for the storywriter and 5% for the manga artist. Commonly their total would come to 10%, but in some rare cases the total combined royalties between storywriter and manga artist can come to 11%, or sometimes the royalties are split differently such as storywriter 6% and artist 4%.

What’s important here is power balance.

For example, when an athelete or a comedian is credited as the storywriter for a manga, a lot of the time these guys are really just lending their name, and aren’t actually writing the story at all. There are exceptions, but most of the time these guys just appear once in a while during meetings to voice an opinion or two. And these guys might be getting 5% just for that.

It’s probably the publisher’s strategy to make use of a famous person’s name to get a manga to sell better, but Satou feels this is disrespectful to the readers who are looking forward to reading the manga, and believes it’s better to stop practices like that.

It’s also disrespectful to the manga artist who is putting in all the actual effort in making the manga.

In Umizaru’s case, Satou got 8% while the man who was credited for creating the original idea and providing ideas and data got 2%.

Earlier it was mentioned that when the work is split between a storywriter and a artist, the combined royalties can sometimes be higher than 10%, but when a manga author is doing both the story and art, the royalties will never go above 10%.

After negotiations with Kodansha failed in 2006 December, Satou signed a contract with Shogakukan instead. In the agreement, he would get 10% in royalties for the first 1,000,000 books, and if it goes higher than 1,000,000, he would get 11%.

At the end of negotiations, Satou finally got what he always wanted, royalties that would change according to performance. And Blackjack ni yoroshiku was renamed to Shin Blackjack ni yoroshiku and started serialization at Shogakukan.

Satou was very happy about this as althought it was only a 1% increase, he finally broke the unwritten law in the manga industry that royalties have to be 10%.

Satou is very thankful to Shogakukan even now.

But this success also came with a sense of failure to Satou as he still had to rely on a publisher to bring manga to his readers in the end.

The circumstances surrounding the life of a manga author still hasn’t changed.

As usual, a manga author cannot live on just the amount that he is paid on a per page basis, and has to rely on the tankoubon royalties to pay for his basic living expenses which is still a risky gamble. At the same time, with threats like used book stores and manga cafes, magazine sales in the industry on the whole have been dropping for 12 years in a row.

The yearly sales for tankoubon in the industry on the whole has somehow managed to maintain itself, but reason behind this is that the number of tankoubon titles being released now is approximately double of what it was 10 years ago.

If we calculate it as total average sales per tankoubon, it would mean that it’s only half of what it was 10 years ago.

Satou felt that something had to change, and started thinking of what he could do to keep manga culture alive 10 years later.

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There’s a difference between a magazine’s officially announced circulation and the actual amount that’s sold. A magazine might officially say that they have 1,000,000 copies in circulation, but that just means that they have printed 1,000,000 copies and not that they can sell 1,000,000 copies.

For example a magazine that Satou knows about officially has 380,000 copies in circulation per issue, but the actual sold is in the vicinity of 150,000. Less than half of what was printed is actually sold.

In Satou’s case, his tankoubon’s actual sales are actually higher than the actual sales for the magazine. If you’d look at this in another way, it can mean that the sales of his tankoubon are helping to advertise the magazine, as opposed to that getting his manga on the magazine is helping to sell his tankoubon.

After various research in recent years, he has found that the readers of a magazine are not always the same readers that are reading the tankoubon.

Satou’s Tokkou no shima always came in last in its magazine’s reader survey results, but the tankoubon sales was the highest of all the manga in the magazine.

Also, a tankoubon that advertises a certain manga has broken the 1,000,000 mark in total may not actually have sold 1,000,000 books. There’s even a term called “bestseller bankruptcy”, where books are printed but are unable to sell at all.

So Satou thought of starting a homepage where he would release his manga and readers who want to read his manga will pay a fee for it.

In the scenario where he sells a 24 page chapter to readers at the rate of 30 yen for one chapter, it would be possible to maintain the same amount of profits if 20% of the magazine’s readers buy his manga online if he moves away from the magazine.

The actual number of readers may drop to only 20% of what it originally was, but there’s a possibility that he can break even or make a profit.

The problem of distribution is solved, and he won’t need to go through distributors either. It feels a little lonely to not have his manga on the shelves in bookstores, but he wouldn’t need to deal with inflexible publishers any more.

There’s a book called Shuppan Shihyou Nenpou and Satou bought the newest edition a year ago, and according to the book, sales for the magazine industry have been dropping for the past 12 years consecutively and this year had a even larger drop, making it 13 years in a row now. The comics market has shrunk by approximately 100 billion yen as compared to in 1992.

Out of the 11368 tankoubon released, only 9 of the tankoubon managed to break the 1 million book mark on the first print run. Magazines are ended their run one after another, all this data is showing that manga publishing is a dying business.

Even after being repeatedly receiving offers for cellphone manga, Satou didn’t take up on any of the offers at all because of his liking for the paper medium and that it would just be changing the company from the publisher to a cellphone content company which doesn’t change his situation at all.

If it’s through the internet, he can take responsibility for everything.

Also, if he is able to offer prices that are cheaper or on the same level as used book stores or manga cafes, he wouldn’t have to be worried about losing users to these business.

The problem was how it would be possible to remove the attachment that people will have to the paper medium.

Satou has convinced himself that it would be okay as long as the tankoubon is published on paper. The guys that read manga from used book stores or manga cafes probably aren’t attached enough to manga to want to collect tankoubon anyway.

There’s nothing bad about this, it’s probably unavoidable that tankoubon will slowly become more of a collector’s item in the future.

Basically, people that read manga online and people that collect tankoubon may not overlap, just as magazine readers and tankoubon readers may not be the same.

So wouldn’t it be possible to make use of the internet, with the final objective to be to publish on paper?

With publishing as the final objective, it might mean that a publisher would have to get involved again, but as long as an ISBN code can be obtained, even if the book is unable to sell through bookstores, it would be possible to sell on online at amazon or other online bookstores at ones own expense.

With this in mind, Satou has drawn up the roughs for a new work, and he started seriously planning the idea of setting up a homepage.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 12:27 pm 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.