Christopher Butcher has posted an open letter to Tokyopop publisher Mike Kiley, explaining just what the problem is with Tokyopop’s online exclusives program. Partly, it’s that he feels betrayed because Tokyopop is taking away titles he worked to build an audience for, and partly it’s that he’s worried it will happen again.
If I do not speak up now, I fear that any mid-list titles you produce, titles that do solid business for us but are not exemplary in any way, will also disappear.
UPDATE: Lyle has some thoughts on how Tokyopop might be repeating the mistakes of others.
About Brigid Alverson
Brigid Alverson has been reading comics since she was 4. After earning an MFA in printmaking, she headed to New York to become a famous artist but ended up working with words instead of pictures, first as a book editor and later as a newspaper reporter. She started
MangaBlog to keep track of her daughters’ reading habits and now covers manga, comics and graphic novels as a freelancer for
School Library Journal,
Publishers Weekly Comics Week,
Comic Book Resources, the
Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog, and
Robot 6. She also edits the
Good Comics for Kids blog at School Library Journal. Now settled in the outskirts of Boston, Brigid is married to a physicist and has two daughters.
All TP is doing is the further promotion of the English scanlation scene. If all your buying is really, really expensive gifs, then there’s just going to be kids who just going to ignore TP altogether. Good luck catching them.
I’ve been losing faith in TP for a while now, but continued to support them because they still had a handful of titles that I truly love (among them “Dragon Head” and the now-I-hear-it’s-on-the-cusp “Beck”). What is frustrating to me is that, as a simple, single consumer and reader, I feel that I have already done all that I can do to support a book — I buy my copies, I try to turn my friends on to it, I talk about it on the forums I belong to, I even plugged them on my friend’s comic podcast. What more can I do to support a title, other than buying a whole truckload of every single volume that comes out?
It seems like TP is doing this all backwards. They should START a series by introducing titles online, and THEN, if demand gets big enough, move them to stores. Not the other way around. I don’t know about the publishing world, but TP’s current tactic seems to me a pretty poor tactic in child-rearing circles: to punish poor performance, rather than reward good performance.
Look, if you don’t like the numbers that “Dragon Head” is pulling in, just sell the license. Let Seven Seas, or Dark Horse, or ANYONE else see what they can do with it. They’d probably thank you for the opportunity.