Manga Poverty

By Shuho Sato

Will manga still exist ten years from now?
A publishing recession with no end in sight... combined with new technology and media that is changing everything. In Japan, manga artists find themselves constantly in debt even working hard week after week. What does this spell for the manga industry in the long run?
For the sake of the future of manga, Sato Shuho decided to ask himself this very question.

"Manga Poverty" is a frightening word. Manga artists work hard during their first week of a new serialization, but no matter how hard they work, they may get their manga canceled halfway through, leaving them with a mountain of debt. This is what causes many manga artists to fade into the shadows, regardless of their talent. Follow as Sato Shuho stands up to the corrupt system of the Japanese manga industry, and find out where his struggle leads him. Anyone interested in manga or publishing must read this book!

Translated by Dan Luffey

• Language: English
• Publisher: Junta Ueno
• Release date: Jun 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301728350

Shuho Sato

Satō is left-handed, and has had a good sense and love of drawing since childhood. He graduated from Hokkaido Sapporo Nishi High School. While enrolled in Musashino Art University and studying in both the Department of Imaging Arts and Sciences and the Department of Sculpture, Satō decided he wanted to pursue a career as a manga artist and subsequently dropped out before graduating. He worked as an assistant to both Nobuyuki Fukumoto and Tsutomu Takahashi, and made his professional debut in 1998 in Weekly Young Sunday with his work Congratulations, though his Promised Land, which was a special selection at the 1997 Afternoon Four Seasons Awards, was technically his debut. Two works, Umizaru and Say Hello to Black Jack have been adapted very faithfully as television dramas and films. Satō won the Japan Media Arts Festival Manga Award for his work Say Hello to Black Jack.

Book preview

Manga Poverty

By Sato Shuho

Translated by Dan Luffey

Copyright Sato Shuho 2013

Published by Manga Reborn at Smashwords

Table of Contents

Prologue

#01. Will manga exist 10 years from now?

#02. Just what are manuscript fees, anyway?

#03. What kind of a life is a life lived off royalties?

#04. A million-seller hit with 220 million yen of profit in a single year...what does that turn my yearly salary into?

#05. Printing one million copies myself would make me a quicker 100 million.

#06. You know, I'm starting to think I should just die along with paper media.

#07. I'll make my own homepage, release my own manga on it, and let all my readers purchase it there.

#08. I haven't had a single meeting with an editor for several years now.

#09. A relationship between mangaka and readers without a publisher in between.

#10. Honestly, doing online comics is hard.

#11. Those books are the publisher's products, not yours.

#12. OK, so how much will it actually cost?

#13. Sato Shuho on Web is open. But is it making money?

#14. You may laugh, but I'm really trying to change the world here.

#15. Marching toward 'Manga on Web'

Epilogue

Credits

Prologue

In February, 2009, I started an e-book site called Sato Shuho on Web.

Currently, we're in the middle of a slump in the publishing world.

Manga magazines keep taking breaks and ceasing publications, and bookstores are disappearing from our streets.

Every year, big publishers find themselves billions of yen in debt, and the industry itself is continuing a 14-year streak of dropping sales. With every new publication, manga magazines and publishers gain tens of millions of yen of increased debt, and so they're constantly scrambling to fill those holes through tankoubon (pocket-sized paperback) volume sales.

Right now, if you go into a bookstore you can still buy books, and there's no way every single bookstore in the country would disappear. However, many changes, both visible and invisible, have begun in various places. While the publishing world deteriorates, digital media is developing, and according to a report by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the ratio of cell phone to household was 95.6%, while computers were at 85.9%. In the previous year, the number of people who have ever used the internet was 90,910,000 people, and the regular usage ratio was 75.3%.

In 2010, with e-book hardware like the Kindle and iPad, Japan finally started getting on board, and this year came to be called E-Book Year 1 (as a reference to Japan's year cataloging system).

Nowadays, seeing people looking at their cell phones on the train is a normal occurrence, and it's much harder to find someone reading a manga magazine. Is this phenomenon merely a slump in the publishing world? Or is it the end of paper culture?

As a mangaka, (a professional manga artist) with over ten years in the industry, I couldn't help but feel an slight uneasiness in my gut.

Will manga even exist in the next decade?

At first it was just an offhand question. But for the sake of the argument, let's say these changes in the publishing world do signal the end of paper culture. Where does that leave manga?

The option to cast in your lot with a publisher still exists, but that may not be the only option anymore. What we take for granted now may not be around forever.

And so, I decided to do an experiment.

#01. Will manga exist 10 years from now?

There's a very scary term that exists in the manga industry called serialization poverty. It refers to the first time a mangaka gets a serialization. You work real hard to draw it all, but after half a year, it still hasn't gotten popular, so it gets canceled. Then all you have left is a big debt. Your serialization has led you to poverty.

When a single manga is serialized in a magazine, a mangaka receives profit known as manuscript fees paid by the publisher, according to the number of pages of the manuscript. Aside from the work necessary to draw the actual manga, data also needs to be collected, the script needs to be thought up, and then the actual panels of the manga need to be planned. There are various steps to the process, but no money is paid out for any of them.

Mangaka pay the rent for the office, pay their art staff, buy their materials and pay for everything else necessary for manga production using the manuscript fee. When Umizaru first began its serialization, I received 10,000 yen for each manuscript page. (*1)

*1: Umizaru (Sea Monkeys) - The author's first serialization, chronicling the work of coast guards. It ran from 1999 to 2001 in Weekly Young Sunday (Shogakukan). It was made into a drama twice by NHK, and then into a film and another drama by Fuji TV. 12 volumes in all.

20 pages were the standard for a weekly serialization, so I received 800,000 yen per month.

I don't think it was that bad a salary for someone as young as I was at the time. But as I just explained, creating a manga requires a lot of different funds.

Let's break down what it actually cost to make Umizaru. First, the manuscript fee is deposited into my bank account from the publisher, minus 10% for withholding tax.

That leaves me with 720,000 yen.

At the time, I didn't have my own company, and I was employing an outer art staff to draw a portion of the art. That cost 470,000, leaving me with 250,000. In this industry, it's custom for the mangaka to pay for the meals of the art staff, and that cost about 100,000, leaving me with 150,000. (*2)

*2: Outer Art Staff - They come from the outside, but we actually worked together. As this is a sole proprietorship, I can't hire employees.

The materials and data cost about 100,000, leaving me with 50,000. The apartment/office that I both lived and worked in cost 70,000 for rent, leaving me with -20,000. Add in utilities and sundry expenses, and it becomes -70,000. These are all just rough estimates, but the manuscript fee alone clearly leaves me in the red. And this is excluding all personal life expenses.

I pay for my own personal expenses, but then there are times when I want to treat my staff to BBQ and such, so no matter how I dice it, I always