Welcome to Day in the Life of a TOKYOPOP Employee!

Making manga is not an easy job. It is a huge and arduous process that takes more than a year to complete. There are a lot of things fans don’t know about the long journey from a Japanese manga to an English language version.

First is the acquisition of new titles to be published, which starts with trying to get the license from Japanese publishers. Editorial Intern Daniella Orihuela-Gruber sat down with Production Manager Marco Pavia and Senior Editor Lillian Diaz-Przybyl to illustrate how the first step of manga publishing is taken.

(Marco, Lillian and Domo-kun at San Diego Comic-Con!)

Daniella: How does the acquisitions process work?

Lillian: We start looking at books from a year to a year and a half in advance. We’re halfway through 2009 right now and we’re licensing for the end of 2010 and the beginning of 2011. Part of that is just that it takes a long time for things to get approved and we need to schedule far in advance to get manga into the catalogue.

The evaluations process starts by looking at Japanese magazines, what’s coming out and keeping track of new series. Then we have bi-weekly meetings where we talk about the pros and cons of publishing books we have found, where they would fit into our lines, if there’s a particular marketing angle. We also tackle issues like how our relationship with the licensor is and how easy they are to work with.  At this point we are doing about 10-12 books a month so we are fairly selective with our titles, but we have a good sense after 10 years of what our audience likes and what is difficult to sell. Once we decide what to offer on, we put it into our database and then our legal team makes an offer. Sometimes we get a counter offer back, sometimes we get questions from the licensor and at some point they give us an approval on it so we can put it into our schedule.

Marco:  For non-Japanese titles, we’re targeting brands that would appeal to our core audience and help to expand our audience. For example, Warcraft manga can appeal to a large shonen fan base, people who play video games and people who don’t read manga and are just Warcraft fans.

A lot of the original stuff we put out is created by people who grew up on manga.  We’re looking for are talented storytellers and artists that would also appeal to our core audience. People submit proposals to us, the editors look on art sites for talented artists who may have some story ideas, some artists may have agents that approach us, we do portfolio reviews at places like Comic-Con and Anime Expo, we visit art schools, too.

For Japanese titles, Lillian and Cindy (another TP editor) are our first line of defense because they can speak Japanese and find out which titles are getting buzz in Japan. I join the acquisitions process during which we discuss what the editors bring in from their first round of research. What I’m looking is a series by a creator we’ve worked with before, a brand with a fan base -- a lot of manga are already on scanlation sites -- and a well-told story.

There’s some film and T.V. properties and directors and creators involved with those T.V. properties that we’re working with, too, and it’s not too dissimilar to working with Japanese manga. We want to make sure it’s a good story line that it would appeal to our audience, and we want to make sure there’s a compelling cast of characters, that there’s an artist and writer tied to the project that can tell a good story.

Daniella: On average, how long does it take you to look for possible titles and how many do you tend to pick at a time?

Lillian:  We tend to do things in waves because the licensors tend to work in waves, so they’ll do approvals for a whole bunch of things all at once. We’ll 20 or 30 offers in play at a time and suddenly we get approval on 15 of them. Then we’ll start to re-evaluate, see where this fits into the schedule, what are our needs, how does this kind of change what we are looking at. We don’t tend to offer on things until there is at least one volume out because sometimes series get cancelled after a few chapters. Usually once the first volume’s out you can get a sense of where the series is going and whether the magazine is really gearing up to make this a big long-running series. You can tell from the ads in the magazine themselves, its pretty clear the series they are rooting for as a company.

Daniella: In your process of looking for manga, how important is it for you to focus on a genre? Do you say, once a certain series has ends, I need a similar manga to fill the hole?

Lillian: That’s a good question because it’s interesting the way Japan and the US define genre differently. One of the things we’ve struggled with is that the categorizations in Japan tend to be comics for girls and comics for guys, which encompass an incredibly wide range of content for both. Whereas genre fiction in the U.S. tends to be more or less un-gendered and separated into science fiction, fantasy, mystery, etc. which don’t necessarily track neatly onto a lot the series we work on. Our top selling series, Fruits Basket, has a complicated family soap opera, but it has a lot of humor in it, a lot of drama in it and there’s a fantasy element. How do you really classify that?

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We don’t really look for genre replacements, but we’re very conscious of demographic and the majority of our audience is female and the majority of our audience are teenagers. It’s not going to be a mature rated title or its not going to be 18 and up so that teens can’t read it. Its going to involve issues and stories that are going to appeal to them so even if the content itself isn’t objectionable, there are certain things that teens don’t seem to be interested in reading. We do tend to aim things a bit more female. There is a trope that girls will read material aimed at boys, but boys are much less likely to read material aimed at girls and that holds true in the manga market, so big series like Bleach and Naruto are more or less male-oriented, but they have  huge female crossover audiences. That’s not to say that boys don’t read Fruits Basket , but it’s definitely the preponderance is girls reading boys stuff and rather than the reverse.

Marco:  For instance, our yaoi line, BLU, it’s a small line that sells really well and I think a part of that is that we’re very targeted in our approach to planning, marketing, and publishing. We have a three-to-five year plan, and I know we need a certain amount of yaoi titles on our list for 2010; we may need X amount of yaoi and right now we have X minus 10 yaoi. So, there are definitely a certain number of titles we want to acquire.

Daniella: What are the deciding factors for you?  What is the total package you look for?

Lillian: Length is something that we’ve been talking about quite a bit lately. We’ve run into problems where a series we think is going to be successful turns out to be not a hit, but for both licensor reasons and fan-relations reasons we can’t really cancel things easily. It can be a very frustrating process to license stuff that is 15 volumes long and as of volume three you’re selling 500 volumes or less. So really determining how much of a risk we want to take on something depending on how long it is that’s a much bigger factor than it used to be.

A series that is unique is also important. It seems like an obvious thing to say, but it is something that we think about. What make a series unique? What makes it something that’s not just another story about a high school girl in love who has problems? What’s going to make this series jump out from the swath of new titles at the bookstore every month? There’s a lot of content out there so we really want ours to be a little different.

There are licensor issues that we think about. There’s plus and minuses to having a series that is based on an anime or has an anime or video game tie-in. The success of series like that is often dependent on when it gets licensed in the United States. Our ability to time our release is important and if the anime series comes out really quickly and we can’t release a volume until two years later, we’ve obviously lost momentum on that. There’s really sort of a guessing game of if we make a good offer, when can we get the first volume out, what if they delay us for some reason, what if there’s a bidding war and we don’t get to do it for two years, is it still worth it?

There’s also another level of approval that you have to go through. Sometimes we get sign off from the book publisher and then it takes another three or four weeks to get a sign off from the video game publisher and that can really slow us down the whole process from initial licensing to right before we go to print. We really don’t want that to happen because we’re working on a tight monthly schedule. There’s a cost-benefit analysis in that.

Daniella: Do you have a soft spot for any particular scenarios in a manga?

Lillian: I’ve discovered recently that I have a soft spot for stories about unusual families, whether it’s about the non-nuclear family or whether its people thrown into unusual circumstances where they kind of bond together in a family-like scenario or people who have dysfunctional families and create a new family. I’m very fond of Saiyuki, which is a story of four guys travelling together that has a very interesting father/son dynamic between two of the characters and Gakuen Alice, which is about kids with magical powers living at a boarding school who, because the adults around are completely untrustworthy, formed their own family situation among their friends. That’s something that I find very appealing and very interesting.

Marco: I do have a soft spot for shojo, and I like comedy. I seem to gravitate toward a main character who is an underdog, and who is really likeable, and who seems to be embroiled in lots of funny moments. I enjoy Me & My Brothers. I also personally like a lot of stuff that doesn’t sell very well and isn’t main stream.