Tag Archives: publishing

Overthinking Things 10/03/2011

Posted on by

This article began its life as an answer to  a question on Quora, where I answer a lot of random questions about things. Publishing is one of those things. The question was, “Are Small Indie Presses Taking the Place of Literary Agents?”

TL;DR Answer – Yes.

Here’s the longer answer:

While so many people write about the death of publishing, there has been a very quiet revolution going on in the publishing industry. Webcomics, Print On Demand and other creator-driven technologies are changing the face of comics publishing. While webcomics have not yet developed into a sustainable business model for comics as a whole, they have radically altered distribution, fundraising and relationship-building for many independent comic artists.

For manga artists in Japan, printing one’s own work, or developing other’s work as a small press, is a well-established subculture and farm league for mainstream comics publishing. Larger publishers comb the halls of the major Comic Market events in Japan to discover talent already nurtured and trained by these doujinshi (which my mechanical translation tool delightfully translates  as “literary coterie magazine”) circles.

In the book publishing world, as large publishing companies pull their resources tighter and tighter, focusing on proven names and mass media tie-ins, small presses are stepping into the space willfully abandoned by literary agents; finding, nurturing and publishing young talent.

I can think of a dozen or more writers and artists I know that have had success dealing directly with small presses where agents wouldn’t give them the time of day.  It’s almost unbelievable when you see how poorly some agents do their job.

The other side of this, of course, is that many young/new writers are woefully, horribly, inconceivably ill-prepared for approaching any agent or publisher. I do my very best to write gentle, sensitive rejection letters when I have to. This does not help. People get angry and often tank any chance of ever working with me by writing enraged, irrational, sometimes incoherent replies, explaining how much I suck for not seeing their brilliance.  I’m glad to provide guidance and advice for creators, but it’s still up to a creator to get their part of the process right.

The advantage for a writer with some few publishing credits (this would be things like magazines and anthology credits, not “I have a blog” credits) under their belt is that a contract with a smaller publisher can, over time, become an entree’ to a larger audience. (Presuming one doesn’t burn bridges, which is easy in a niche field with only a few potential publishers.) The money and the promotional support is going to be minimal, so basically all a writer is getting is editorial and printing assistance – which is worth a great deal. Unfortunately most authors don’t realize that. They just see the small advance and small sales and get pissed that the company isn’t doing more. In reality, a first-time contract with a larger publisher is also unlikely to include much in the way of promotional support. The reality for first-time authors is that they are going to be almost completely responsible for their own book promotion.

Literary agents rarely have any energy or ability to take risks. Driven by market pressures, they have  to produce best sellers as quickly as possible. In the meantime, indie publishers, driven primarily by passion, have interest in and ability to develop new talent. Small indie publishers have fewer resources, but can take more risks.

Small presses, like creator-driven publishing, are definitely changing the publishing landscape.

And, no matter how I look at it, I think it’s about time that was changed.

Doing Manga Wrong

Posted on by

There are a lot of Japanese-language alternative manga that are as good as, or better than, most of the English-language alternative comics that have been critically lauded. There are only a few English-language publishers who license and translate alternative manga, and their collective output of manga is a trickle compared to the wealth of material out there. So why do I fear the possibility of Drawn & Quarterly licensing one of my favorite manga? Because of how they publish their manga. I’ve expressed my opposition to the way Drawn & Quarterly publishes its manga in comments here and elsewhere, so I’m grateful to Noah for inviting me to write a post on the subject. It won’t be a very long post, because the case against Drawn & Quarterly’s method is so straightforward that it requires no elaboration.

In Japan, almost all comics are read right to left. This means that every row of panels is read starting from the right. Currently, almost all English-language manga publishers that I know of leave things this way. They exception is Drawn & Quarterly: when they publish manga, they rearrange the panels on each page so it reads left to right.*

If you only consider the panels in isolation, Drawn & Quarterly’s way might seem to be best: it preserves the original orientation of the panels, while not requiring the Western reader to read right to left. But by rearranging the panels, the visual relationships between panels are destroyed, as is the overall composition of the page, thus destroying the page’s integrity.

Someone might retort: “Drawn & Quarterly’s manga look perfectly fine to me.” In the first place, the composition and especially the relationships between panels probably affects the reading experience more on a subconscious level than a conscious one most of the time. In the second place, even if a page in Drawn & Quarterly’s manga looks as good as the original, it still isn’t the page the artist drew. It’s pieces of that page, cut up and shuffled around. Any aesthetic value the new composition and panel relationships may have will be a fortuitous accident. (In some cases, the adapter may be able to affect this to some degree; but at best (s)he will have a very limited number of options.)

Sometimes it’s argued that Drawn & Quarterly’s method is commercially necessary, but this is belied by the fact that virtually all other current publishers of manga, including publishers of alternative manga (e. g. Fantagraphic, Top Shelf, Picturebox) publish their manga right-to-left, leaving the art as it is. And if Drawn & Quarterly feels it has to make its manga read left to right, it would be much better to simply reverse the entire page including the art, as if it were reflected in a mirror. This has its disadvantages — for instance, right-handed characters become left-handed and vice versa — but the page’s integrity is preserved.

In other comments on the subject, I’ve called Drawn & Quarterly’s method “mutilation.” I’ve refrained from that here. For one thing, I now think that as far as the result is concerned, it goes a little too far. For another, the people at Drawn & Quarterly clearly believe that they’re being respectful to the manga, even though objectively they aren’t.** What’s so frustrating is that they’re bringing over worthy manga, which otherwise would probably never get translated into English; but they’re doing it wrong, when it would actually be easier and cheaper to do it right.

*They may not do this all the time. They don’t seem to have done it with The Box Man, although I can’t say for certain.

**To avoid misunderstanding, I’m not asserting that they’re being disrespectful to the manga artist, but to the manga itself.