All Entries in the "Publishing" Category

Why You Should Pay Artists For Sample Pages

A reader on our Facebook Page asked

Hey Alex, I’m curious, when you look for artists, do you go strictly by their portfolio or do you pay for sample panels?

I thought my answer might be useful for others so I’m posting it up here.

Amazon excluding LGBT material from searches!

Amazon seemed to have decided to unilaterally exclude LGBT books from their internal searches. So… what’s going on?

Who Really Reads Yaoi in English?

Communications professor and literary author Dru Pagliassotti has written a scholarly paper about Western yaoi fandom revealing the results of a 2005 online survey. Alex links and shares some of her provocative findings– with a few caveats.

How To Succeed As A Freelance Artist

The best advice Alex has found so far for making money while making comics.

How To Keep Manga Fans Out Of Jail

A manga fan is arrested in his own home for owning manga for personal use. The next time it could be you. Here are the details of the case and one thing you can do right now to help change the law.

Why Comics Need Age Ratings

Recently, John Shableski of Diamond Book Distributors, writing as The Graphics Novel Guy, has been writing about Age Ranges for Graphic Novels. In an article, he wrote on May 19th, he made this bold claim:

I think I have finally nailed what the tipping point will be for the graphic novel publishing industry and it comes down to the applications of age ranges.

How to Survive as a Small Yaoi Publisher Part 2

A conversation with Simon Jones of Icarus Publishing.

So, last time we talked about the difference between manga and porn, what it means to be a successful publisher of erotic comics and what challenges face those who choose to publish this material. This time we’ll talk about working with Japanese publishers and bring the focus more specifically on what English-language yaoi publishers need to do to succeed in today’s market.

How to Survive as a Small Yaoi Publisher

A conversation with Simon Jones of Icarus Publishing.

Recently, there’s been some discussion about how some small yaoi publishers have been struggling despite offering quality yaoi titles to their readers. With DramaQueen in particular, it saddens me to hear of their difficulties — I’ve enjoyed their work, found their enthusiasm infectious and have great affection for company president Tran Nguyen, despite having only met her a couple of times — she’s just that cool.

So, the question for me is “How can a small yaoi publisher survive, even flourish, in today’s competitive bookselling marketplace?”

Yaoi 911™ in Prism Guide 2008

So late last year, I was chatting with my buddy and colleague, Tommy Roddy — he’s the creator of Pride High, a series of comics about gay teen superheroes in high school — and he turned me on to this guide that comes out once a year which offers readers excerpts from a bunch of gay comics. It’s created by the folks at Prism Comics and serves as a kind of a who’s who and what’s what for the gays in both mainstream and independent Western comics.

Anyway, I reached out to them, one thing led to another and now there’s an excerpt from “A Shot in the Dark” in the current issue!

Should Yaoi Creators Fight Sexism?

My very good friend Bill S. recently sent me a link to an article by creator Joss Whedon (whom I greatly admire and occasionally take to task) titled “Let’s Watch A Girl Get Beaten To Death.”

You should read it. It’s a well-written piece and fits nicely into a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about lately:

By creating this book, am I making the world less safe for women?

Yaoi Art: From Pencils to Inks

I’ve covered writing and formatting the script as well as using thumbnail sketches as an aid to creating final pencils. Traditionally, the next step in the process would be to ink those pencils.

So, let’s talk about what that means, look at how the process has changed in the digital age and, of course, show you examples of cute boys covered in digital ink.

Why Most Manga Books Are Small and Black-and-White

I was asked why I was choosing to publish the first Yaoi 911™ book in color — an unusual choice for a manga book. In responding to that, I also commented on reasons why the vast majority of manga books here in the U.S. are not published in color, despite our culture’s current embrace of full-color comics. And I gave some reasons why these books are consistently published in a small “digest-size” format (typically around 5″ x 7.5″) as well.

I thought that readers might find these topics interesting, thus I decided to put my response into its own post. So, if you’re curious about why manga is printed the way it is here or why I’m bucking this tradition by creating full color yaoi, read on!

Why This Gay Man Is Creating Yaoi

Recently, in private correspondence, a woman asked me this question:

You want to make Yaoi? Why? I think I’d like to see you make something by a gay man for a gay man that might appeal to me on my level. 0_0.

Even though I’ve tried to address the larger issue of this in previous posts, this question brings up a specific point that I feel is worth responding to.

Should Yaoi Be Just For Women?

Yaoi is written predominantly by and for women — but is it “just for women”? Yaoi works feature guys falling in love, guys kissing and guys having sex — but is it actually “not homosexual”?

Who “owns” yaoi and why this is important is the subject of this article.

The Sweet Yaoi Action You Can Expect From Me

Some things I’ve been reading lately have gotten me thinking about “The One True Yaoi.”

I’ve talked about my motivation some in “Why Yaoi?” but I wanted to tell you the story behind why I’m making these books and what you can expect in them.