Kodansha Offers Digital Mangaka 25% Royalties

well, in the age of the internet, publishers really need to start paying their content providers allot more. i see the near future with nearly no publishers, since there is no need for a middleman for internet publishing since its so simple and requires very few resources.

I don't understand why they cry about not having any new talents in this market. of course who would work his soul out to get raped from publishers??
they dig their own grave until the very end.

I guess the new talents exist, they just draw doujinshi - and keep drawing doujinshi, because they earn more that way.

With a blatant disrespect towards the mangaka and their incredibly poor business sense, is it no wonder that the money is slipping from between their fingers?

"And plus to this (forgot to login) - the automatic acquisition of the author rights - that's insane."

Hey, guess how copyright is handled for American comic book characters.

Yup, that's right, publisher are given full rights and don't have to return it to the original creator unless they don't use the character for something like 20 years.

personally i would like an editorial department like in bakuman, where over all they bring ideas that the mangaka dont think of to try and make it better, but dont have as much say as to what actually happens, if the mangaka says no to their ideas.

Good editors can play a vital role in advising the creators on how to improve their work. Where this advice is lacking, it can lead to bad cases of George Lucas syndrome.

well there was a case that pressed the point earlier on sankaku, that one woman that was not very good at drawing bishoujo, where she apparently does not do any research nor make an attempt to use references. you know... that one lady who bought an airsoft sniper rifle?
apperently she said "fuck off" to her publishers earlier, and even with pretty low quality production, she still makes enough to afford a big ass house with a BMW in her driveway... IN JAPAN... so yea, that just shows, you can make a shitload if you drop conventional publishers.

no, she draws for a very specific demographic that doesn't give a shit about art as much a the shonen do. all of shoujo looks alike, and that is a fact. if you can do even close to that you can make money so long as there is a decent story behind it which i think she has.

I do believe she is a shoujo mangaka, therefore the women reading only want to see sexy men? And aside from that she was rich for some other reason. A side business or family ties. So it's disappointingly irrelevant. But the point is good.

you must remember, this is not conventional publishing, its INTERNET publishing, which is much more simple and cheap, since it does not require you to make thousands upon thousands of physical copies, all you do is upload the data to a server and you are done.
and if you havent noticed, the "royalties" that are traditionally given to mangaka are likely to be in the low single digit percentages, even popular mangaka dont make enough to even have a decent sized home, instead they work with a team in a cramped condo, subsisting on instant food.
i dont think you really understand how things work... and no, its not 100jpy to 1usd anymore, that was the case about a decade ago, its closer to 80jpy to 1usd now... the usd is worthless now, even the canadian dollar is about 1 to 1 to the usd... now thats a pretty bad indication.

Or just an indication that the Canadian economy is doing fairly well. Which it is, despite being so desperately tied to the American economy, which likely won't fully recover till 2013.

Do note that mangaka generally pay their own assistants from the royalties they get. Even if the royalties seem high at first, imagine paying three other people with them in order to get your stuff done on schedule.

Plus, yeah, internet publishing. Which basically does not have a breakeven at all. A server is paid for, monthly. A high bandwidth connection might cost a lot. Then there's software running on there that handles payment verification, and you need some maintenance staff. Tadah, done.

This is a monthly fixed cost, to unlimited-publish all manga from the same publisher online. The cost per individual chapter is going to be neglegible, and since costs barely change with the addition of more content, as I said, no breakeven, the first sale is a profit. I bet you could pay 95% to the author while still maintaining the servers, assuming you recouped the initial investment already and that you host at least one or two very popular works. Giving the author less in turn makes you profit. Hence fair rates like 70% to the author at Amazon happen. Author gets 70% of the cake, amazon gets 20%-25% of the cake, rest is maintaining the service.

Win-win, really. In the face of that, 25% to the authors is a pure ripoff. Especially when they take all rights to the work for themselves.

no no, you are looking at this the wrong way.

they say 25% or what it is now at 10% or less of the proffits.

that meas the the publishing costs and all that are taken into account before the profit is distributed.

now that said, with a physical medium, you are taking a big fucking risk printing because you don't know how many people want, and they try to make that and nothing more, if it undersells the cost is on the publisher. in those days 50/50 on a new work, to even 25/75 would be reasonable, but once its a proven commodity, than it would be 75+/25- split.

digital works, it should idealy be a 90/10 split, or even less, but thats not realistic.

kindle like things are great, for there purpose, which is to last weeks on a single charge and make for easy reading. and in that reguard they are a major success.

I'm happy if a device lasts a full day. More is an added bonus, but not really necessary.