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Manga Answerman - Does Buying English-Language Manga Releases Support the Mangaka?

You're conveniently leaving out the fact that scanlations sites always tell people to support the official release when/if it is licensed in their country.

They tend to drop manga when they realize it's been licensed.

I found this part extremely bias. You only talked about one side of the issue and refused to talk about the other side.

And from some cursory checking, I haven't found any "support official releases" language on those sites -- only BS smokescreens like "Copyrights and trademarks for the manga, and other promotional materials are held by their respective owners and their use is allowed under the fair use clause of the Copyright Law," i.e. the same CYA boilerplate that bootleg streaming sites use.

Also while the manga market is very small in America when compared to Japan it is growing and there have been reports that it is now larger than the comic book industry.

Aquamine-Amarine wrote:

Quote: So get over yourselves, American fans -- in this case, you're not #1. Just had to stick your anti-American bias in there somewhere.

I wouldn't go so far. I think it was an awkwardly placed and weak attempt at humor with the expected result that a few people might find it vaguely insulting. It didn't really add anything to her previous sentence.

Aquamine-Amarine wrote:

You're conveniently leaving out the fact that scanlations sites always tell people to support the official release when/if it is licensed in their country. They tend to drop manga when they realize it's been licensed.

There's something like 50 scanlation sites where I could read last week's My Hero Academia with a click of a button, and even though they might tell people to "support the official release" on their splash page, they don't seem too broken up about all the revenue they're getting from people without ad blockers turned on.

I'm sure that there must be some sites that drop the titles after they are licensed, but those aren't the sites that would come up if I googled "latest Attack on Titan chapter".

It is true that if you buy manga directly from Japan the money goes directly to the creators while if you buy the translated licensed stuff locally most of the money will go to the distibutors and only a small fraction will revert back to the original creators in Japan.

In other words, if you spend 1,000 dollars importing manga from Japan it will contribute much more for the industry than if you spend 1,000 dollars on manga from local stores.

It is as if NA fans are completely unaware that manga/anime is a massive entertainment industry in Japan that sells billions of volumes of magazines and books and the anime industry is worth 2 trillion yen while it represents only a small underground niche in NA.

It is true that if you buy manga directly from Japan the money goes directly to the creators while if you buy the translated licensed stuff locally most of the money will go to the distibutors and only a small fraction will revert back to the original creators in Japan.

That's not true. In Japan, just like in the US, you're paying a retailer, who pays a publisher, who pays the author. Only in 0.001% of cases (where an author might be self-publishing a book digitally on their own website) are you ever paying the author directly.

If you really want to support manga artists, buy Japanese manga digitally on Bookwalker. You can use your English account to sign into the Japanese version of the site, and buy magazine issues, manga, and light novels. It's what I do.

I don't know about you, but some $$ to a manga creator is better than the $0 they'd get from their work being posted on a pirate website.

So, if we were to even say that, out of that ~$6.50 per volume that gets split up between Viz, the distributors, Shueisha, & Sui Ishida, the original creator only gets 1% of that money (we'll just round that up to $0.07/sale), then going off of the sales numbers that Deb gave us, Ishida still would have made ~$354... And that's just from comic book store sales alone. Considering that Tokyo Ghoul as a whole made ~$3.5 million dollars in sales last year, even if we cut it in half to account for the various sellers' shares, and then theoretically say that Ishida only gets 1% of that money, then he still would have received ~$17,500 from royalties from North American sales of his manga in 2017 alone.

What's my point, though? I would think that Ishida gets more than 1% royalties in the grand scheme of things, but even if he did, he'd be getting some good money.

If I love a story that much then I want the official volumes and if it's something that's now out of print I scour ebay or other sites looking for second hand copies. I don't agree with using these sites as a means of getting something for nothing and bypassing spending money which goes to the creator. Obviously if you want something to carry on being made be it anime or manga then it's only right to buy the official merchandise.

Some groups may drop scanlations of licensed manga, but they're frequently picked up by other groups, much like what happened with TV-fansubs in the pre-streaming era. Plus, there's all kinds of excuses available, like "The official release will take YEARS to catch up" or "PC US companies will censor it to cater to snowflakes!" or "The official release will localize/over-translate/not use the same terms people are comfortable with" -- no doubt leafy_sea_dragon can illuminate that last one

This is my favourite argument. It's just so untrue nowadays - even the Pokemon and Yugioh manga are completely unchanged.

Nonsense. None of the scanilation sources I've ever perused do so. Scanilations of officially licensed manga are available for viewing or download right alongside those that aren't licensed. And they don't tell you which is which. (They probably don't know, they do know that few pirates care.)

And that's only possible because the original scanilators made the scanilations available in the first place, and they still bear responsibility for that act.

FWIW, my local B&N has dedicated a pretty much fixed area to manga and graphic novels/comic material for about five years. The proportions see-sawed back and forth, but the total area remained the same.

Last month they re-organized... and increased the size of both considerably, manga more so than comics.

"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" -Gabe Newell.

The “buy Japanese” argument feels like its mostly being used as some smokescreen or true fan BS. Sure Japanese sales are the most immediately effective, so if you can and want why not. I import original Japanese videos and books. But, I don't like the people that I've met who import who tend to puff themselves up about it. Or just disparage their domestic industry if they have one at every opportunity. (Which there can be some issues but, that’s no excuse to be awful towards the human beings who work hard to localize titles.)

What's my point, though? I would think that Ishida gets more than 1% royalties in the grand scheme of things, but even if he did, he'd be getting some good money.

Some people like to think that Japanese creators like Japanese money more than American money. At the end of the day, a dollar is a dollar (or a dollar is ~109 yen). The source doesn't really matter. The only reason Japan might "like" Japanese money more is because Japanese fans just contribute a lot more money due to volume. So the idea that creators don't think American money makes a difference is silly; I'll totally take $100 in pesos if I can convert it.

How much of that $12.99 from the sales of Tokyo Ghoul Volume 1 that was sold in a N. American bookstore or comics hop actually shows up in Sui Ishida's monthly (I think?) royalty checks? Well, I don't know exactly how much, but it's safe to say, it's a lot less that $6.50. But it's a lot MORE than $0.00 that Ishida would get from people reading Tokyo Ghoul from a scanlation site.

I don't want to give my favorite artists $.02 for buying manga. I want to give them more and there should be such an option.