The Star of Malaysia looks at the future of digital comics. Futabasha Publishers is talking about going from the phonebook magazine format to a free webcomic, then printing the collected chapters in a single book (as they do now).
It’s an interesting evolutionary step. Sales of the magazines, which usually collect a single chapter of several different stories, are dropping, while book sales are holding steady, so it’s natural that publishers would look for an alternative. The web comics would be free, with advertising paying the costs. If that sounds unlikely, consider the way the magazine business operates in the U.S.. When I worked for a women’s magazine (20 years ago, but I don’t think things have changed much), we actually lost money on subscriptions. That’s right: The subscription fee didn’t cover the cost of producing and mailing the magazines. We made our money on advertising, and subscriptions were important because they were guaranteed circulation; the higher your circ, the more you can charge for ads. The reason I don’t think this has changed is that I keep getting subscription offers for $10 and $12 a year, which would barely cover mailing costs, let alone content and production. Magazines that don’t take ads, such as Cooks Illustrated, charge about four times as much.
So the appeal of webcomics immediately becomes apparent: You offer free samples, which draw in the readers, which allows you to sell ads. Then you make more money by selling the books, for which you can charge enough to make a profit. This seems to be the model in Korea, and Netcomics has already brought it over here, except they charge a small amount (25 cents) for each chapter. I’d rather look at ads, myself, than deal with setting up a PayPal account or whatever it takes to buy something for a quarter online, but that’s just me.
Anyway, the Japanese publishers seem to be behind in the technology:
Blood editor-in-chief Naohiro Nakamoto says: “Most manga manuscripts are still analogue (handwritten on paper), and it’s behind other publishing fields. If we could have them in digital format from the beginning, it would be easy to distribute overseas.”
Amazing! From what I’ve read on creators’ blogs, most OEL artists switch over to a computer at some point in the process, so this would be easier for American publishers.
And in fact, Seven Seas is doing something very like that: They are releasing three titles as webcomics, with the printed book to follow. This seems to have worked well for Aoi House, which is a webcomic on the site; they just released volume 1. At Love Manga, David Taylor comments that he would be happy to read comics online as long as he could eventually get them in book form. I suspect a lot of people would. And Seven Seas added some value to the Aoi House book by fully toning the art (made a big difference!) and adding some extras.
As David points out, digital comics should be more than just scans of paper comics.
Something which isn’t read in a linear fashion but actually evolves on the screen, i.e. something you cannot do with a book.
Otherwise, he says, it’s just another way to distribute books.
