The manga industry is pretty small, and yet, also fairly huge too.
Well, if that’s not fairly vague, more explanation: If you wanted to know how small the manga industry is, compare it to video game and book publishers in the US, and yeah, then it’s small. But there are thousands of volumes released in print or digital each year for manga. That actually pales in comparison to Japan’s catalog of works, which could be more in the hundreds of thousands.
Renta! is one of those publishers publishing manga. It just so happens though that they’re bringing over some manga for the female audience. Sara, who goes by Sara-Sensei on the English Renta account, started working at Renta! in Japan last year, and she’s seen a new side of the industry that continues to grow as the months go on. Over email a few weeks ago, she answered some questions about this, and what the future holds for not just Renta, but for the industry.
TheOASG: How did you get interested in manga?
Sara: I think my first exposure to manga was in university. I’ve always been a bit of a language nerd, and my casual interest in Japanese led me to an anime club on campus that had weekly viewing parties in a large theater hall. At the time they were showing things like Naruto, Bleach, Fruits Basket, and a variety of other popular series.
As I learned more about anime, I also learned that shows like Naruto were based on the manga that came out of comic magazines like Shounen Jump.
I probably didn’t really get addicted to manga until I moved to Japan, where it’s a much bigger part of the culture. The difference in the size of the manga section in bookstores alone was quite a shock. I’ve always loved bookstores too, so having so much manga at my fingertips – in the original Japanese no less – felt like a blessing.
You went from living in Texas to moving to Japan. What made you want to do that?
I was one of those kids who couldn’t wait to get out of the countryside and move to a big city, so going to university in Austin was the first step. After graduation, I had a 9-5 office job in a really lovely company, but after 1 year of that, my heart was screaming “IS THIS WHAT MY LIFE IS GOING TO BE LIKE UNTIL I DIE!?”
I loved Austin too, but I knew it was time to shake things up. I was considering moving to New York City, but then it dawned on me that I could live anywhere in the world, so why not go to Japan?
I’d always admired Japanese culture through what I learned of it studying Japanese, but when I was a student in university, I had heard that you couldn’t live or work there without a proper 4-year degree.
Well. Now I had one! So I applied for a few positions by email, did a job interview on the phone, and a few short months later I had sold all my furniture and carried my whole life in two suitcases and a carry-on to my new home in Japan.
How did you get the opportunity to work at Renta?
Before coming to Renta! I was working as an English writing assistant for a Japanese author. After several years with him, he encouraged me to take the next step and find the opportunity to do something I love. When I looked around at the jobs that were advertising for open positions at the time, I never imagined that I would find something related to manga.
I saw Renta!’s ad, my heart did a flip, I sent in my resume, took a translation editor’s test, and after several face-to-face interviews, here I am!
You’ve been at Renta! since 2017 — how have your responsibilities grown since you got started there?
As one of the editors, it’s my job to compare the translated manga to the original Japanese to ensure the final product is as great as it can be before its release. This includes word choice and nuance of course, but also all the visual aspects as well, meaning we take a strict look at the lettering quality and art. (One of my favorite things to do, when possible, is to make covers more beautiful by deleting the Japanese and replacing it with English in a style that matches the original pretty closely.)
I’m also in charge of SNS, including Twitter and Facebook, and we just started putting together an official staff blog that will be released soon (it’s now live). Since our twitter account is technically BL (Yaoi) focused, I get to have a lot of fun over there, and connecting with the growing community of BL fans is one of the best parts of my job.
It’s also a privilege to meet with publishers face to face and encourage them to get more manga out there in English. This month I’ll be flying to Seattle to do research for Sakuracon since there’s a chance we’ll be setting up a booth there next year. I think there may be a trip to New York in the near future, too.
I’m a full-time staff member, which as you can see by the sheer variety of what I do, gives me a little bit of freedom to suggest ideas and create proposals, so long as all the important editing work gets done.
What’s been some of the challenges of managing the service?
Challenge 1) Logistics!
One of the challenges that comes up over and over again is just the nature of working in a publishing industry that is undergoing big changes as the world shifts from print to digital. The industry in Japan is a lot different than what you’ll find in America or other western countries, but the pressure from dwindling print media sales is the same. This has had a large impact on their mood when it comes to licensing translations for overseas publishing.
Some publishers are extremely happy to have their artists’ work reaching new audiences in English through digital formats. However, some publishers are doubling down their focus and spend most of their energy trying to get printed media sales back up to where they used to be, and taking a chance on digital media is not one of their priorities.
As a big fan of BL myself, however, it drives me crazy when this mindset prevents us from being able to offer English titles for some of my favorite artists.
There’s been a long history of this, though. To protect their territory and investments, Japanese publishers also pushed back on e-book services like Kindle back when it was brand new. That’s one reason why it took so long for it to take off in Japan (relatively speaking), and even to this day there’s no guarantee that your favorite book will be immediately available in digital format.
Challenge 2) Fighting the misconception that manga is free.
The popularity of Japanese manga spread long before publishers began warming up to the idea of releasing licensed official English translations, so the birth of lots of volunteer scanlation groups came as no surprise. Many people were grateful for fan-based translations and free distribution online back when there were no official versions available.
However, now we’re facing a situation where published artists are being told by publishers that their books aren’t selling, which means you might not get Volume 5 of that thing you love because Volumes 1-4 were made available by a pirate website and affected sales enough to do some heavy damage. (Pirated digital-manga is not only a translation issue; the challenge of combating Japanese pirate sites is something that artists and publishers face here in Japan, too.)
I follow hundreds of Japanese artists on social media to stay in touch with what’s going on in the industry, and every day I see how it hurts some of my favorite mangaka directly as they share their personal stories.
The fact that we go through the not-without-its-struggles process of negotiating contracts with Japanese publishers for each manga we translate the legal, bureaucratic way ensures that every artist gets paid exactly what they earn. So, it always hurts my heart when people online comment with questions like “Why do I have to pay for this? I’ll just search for it at —.com”.
There are a growing number of legal sites like Webtoons that offer manga or other styles of comics for free, and that’s wonderful! But if you find manga that we’ve licensed and translated on someone else’s site for free, it’s stolen, illegal, and it only hurts the artist who created it.
For every new fan who turns into a paying customer through an illegal manga site, there will be 50 more new fans who just form the belief that all manga is free.
Challenge 3) Keeping sane.
My job is to look at erotic manga 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Even the artists who draw the manga don’t read that much every day. Occasionally there is a need for some good soul-cleansing Shoujo.
You say one of the challenges is fighting the misconception that manga is free. An example I’ll give you is that I ended up reading scanlations, and had no idea of anything like piracy and what it does around high school, college age. It was just there, for free. I learned later about why it’s bad. What do you think fans, media, etc, could do to change this mindset?
I think that many people first get exposed to manga through scanlations in a similar way. The scanlators themselves don’t even have bad intentions, and most of them do it out of love. I think there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the industry itself as it has been changing from print to digital, and a lack of understanding of what it actually means to support an artist.
People who are new to manga often genuinely have no idea that there is a difference between actual free content and “industry-published” manga. However, there’s a big difference between free and paid content.
If the creator (of manga, music, art, etc…) WANTS you to be able to access the content they created for free, that’s one thing. But if they have worked hard to earn a contract with a publisher and are selling that product in order to make a living, it’s really not okay to share that for free. It’s not even okay to share it with a note saying “This isn’t mine, it belongs to the copyright holder,” because that is NOT supporting the artist. That’s just you sharing someone else’s content with your hands up saying “I know this isn’t mine, please don’t spam me with comments that I stole it.” (Please link to the original work on the artist’s site or ask for their explicit permission, even when it’s free. Do not repost things. Always reblog, never repost. Always retweet, never quote.)
For manga artists, this is their job! As fans, we need to understand that. You wouldn’t eat at a restaurant and walk out without paying. You can’t walk into a bookstore and take whatever books you want, either. (Fellow editor: “Well, you technically can but that’s called shoplifting.”) Restaurants can’t employ chefs when everyone steals food, and bookstores and publishers have literally been shutting down, many of them telling authors that their works are not selling so they won’t be able to continue series. (I recall this enlightening article that went around sometime last year: http://maggie-stiefvater.tumblr.com/post/166952028861/ive-decided-to-tell-you-guys-a-story-about )
I’m also reminded of another common artist struggle that you hear about online, where they are constantly asked to create work for free, and face complaints by upset fans that are angry at having to pay for commissions.
You’ll find that in Japan, manga in actual “physical” bookshops are even wrapped in plastic so that you can’t read it until you purchase it. Sometimes bookstores will offer one chapter unwrapped as a sample, or the first volume of an ongoing series to give people a taste. We do this as well and that is the intention behind offering the first chapter of something for free.
In our case, being able to read published manga is not a right. Manga is a product for sale. A common complaint is that “I’m too broke! I can’t afford it!” This is a very (VERY) relatable sentiment! But if you don’t have money to pay for it, it’s still wrong to go out of your way to get it for free. Libraries exist. We are not a library tho, we’re a book *store* that translates and letters manga to the highest quality that we possibly can before releasing the manga for sale so that we can get money back to the publishers and artists.
I’m not sure if you’re aware of what’s happening in Japan right now, but there is a site called Manga(—-) that has been illegally sharing manga in the original Japanese, and it’s been escalating recently. The pirate website is actually offering subscription services soon, where people will be paying money to read the stolen manga. I can’t even describe to you how many levels of wrong that is, but as you can imagine, it’s very bad.
If people keep spreading stolen manga, books, music, anime, tv shows, movies, etc… the future for artists does not look bright. I don’t know how things will change over the coming years as artists find ways to keep up with technology and still make a living, but I hope it comes from a place of pure creativity and love for what they do, and not a knee-jerk reaction to people taking advantage of the fact that traditional media is so easy to abuse and take advantage of once it’s in digital format.
I don’t mean to sound preachy in everything I’ve said about this topic, but setting aside personal feelings and taking an honest look at the situation makes me genuinely sad for young artists who get inspired by the current generation to find creative work. It takes a lot of guts and hard work to make it in an industry that is seemingly breaking down and changing so much at once that it’s hard to make anything, much less “it”.
What fans can do:
To change the misconception that manga is free, the easiest thing for fans to do is to stop recommending free sites to your friends.
Our friends have a huge influence on us and make a huge difference in the kind of hobbies and media we get into. My senpai explained, “Peer pressure is still a thing! We trust our friends and we listen to them, especially if they take a stand on an issue.”
If my friend says to me, “This manga is so great! You should check it out!” and sends me a link, naturally I will read it there. So don’t send your friends to illegal sites to introduce them to new manga and artists. There are a growing number of companies trying to offer legal ways to buy manga besides us, and I would strongly encourage people to link to official sites when making recommendations.
I don’t mean to put all the burden on fans, though. The people actually stealing the product and uploading it to “free” sites need to realize that they are not supporting the artist in any way, shape, or form when they do that.
You can also put yourself in the artist’s shoes. Imagine that you have been working for years creating art, and you’ve reached the level where an actual publisher wants to sell your work (in printed AND digital form, hopefully). Then the day it comes out, someone takes it and shares it with millions of people for free. I dare you to try to get something taken down off the internet that has been uploaded without your permission. It’s not fun.
Levels of Sin:
Readers
Guilty of (usually unknowingly) abusing a situation that’s already broken, and are not directly responsible for what broke the situation to begin with. (This is why it helps when you stop recommending illegal sites. It stops the flow and prevents a bad situation from becoming worse.) Verdict = You get to go to Limbo, or the second level of hell reserved for the “lustful” ;D
Scanlators
Scanlation groups come in two flavors: The virtuous and the evil.
Virtuous scanlators work hard to share manga from Japanese artists because they love it, and want to make it available when it isn’t available anywhere else. They are often very principled and will stop distribution once a title has becomed licensed.
Evil scanlators don’t really care and think they are doing artists a favor by sharing their work, even when it’s available in bookstores, digital or otherwise. Adding a note that says “This is available at such and such for sale! Support the artist!” comes from good intentions, but it’s still pretty evil.
Uploader Sites
Any way you look at it, these sites have crossed the line.
My senpai once shared with me the story of how one user on our site went through the entire catalog, took screenshots of everything, and directly uploaded them to an illegal site. (In case you were wondering, yes this is trackable and it’s very, very evil. Google and the FBI agent personally assigned to you will assist us in our efforts to stop this kind of thing.) Some of the comments were like, “Thank you so much for your hard work!” I don’t think I’ve ever seen my sweet, gentle-natured senpai so enraged about a single statement before : ) Whoever said that has no idea of how much hard work went into providing that manga, and how many hours, people, and artists worked hard to translate that content and make it available in English, legally.
They didn’t even scanlate, they just stole it. What hard work?
For the record, I think MangaUpdates is a fantastic resource and database. I just wish they would immediately remove any previously available scanlation information once a manga has been published and licensed legally by any provider.
What bookstores and legal services can do:
We can listen to our users (as well as people who aren’t our users) to see what they’d like to see on our site. We do have a feedback section on our site where you can submit inquiries and requests, and it makes me happy to see that kind of thing from our readers. (Not everything is immediately possible, but we do take requests very seriously, so thank you to everyone who has written in already.)
We can also raise awareness at events or by speaking to media and encourage people to actually support artists as much as possible.
How exactly does Renta! operate? Do you do all the licensing, localization, etc?
Yes, we do all the licensing and localization ourselves.
The English Renta! site is still young enough that we technically are still part of the much larger Japanese Renta!, which has been around for more than 20 years and is one of the most popular places to find digital-manga in Japanese. (…Especially BL!)
So as I sit here writing this to you, I can see the 90 or so employees of the Japanese side working away at their desks to provide manga online in Japanese. The part-time staff are busily erasing Japanese, coloring pages in Photoshop, or working on 2-D animated manga.
Being part of a Japanese company has its perks. Being an established company already makes licensing manga in English a bit more accessible to us over here in the International Department.
The process goes something like this:
Step 1) We negotiate with Japanese publishers for translation and selling rights.
Step 2) Once permission has been granted, we have the manga translated by freelancers or a translation company.
Step 3) When the translations come in, we (the editors) closely compare the Japanese originals and English translations to check for accuracy and smoothness of localization.
Step 4) When it comes to type-setting, we use the original, clean images received from the publishers, meaning there’s no need to remove any “dirt” on the page. We then erase all the Japanese speech and as many sound effects as we can. Every single sound effect gets translated, so the time taken varies depending on how “noisy” a scene is.
Step 5) The lettered manga gets reviewed by a second, different editor, who polishes the final product before it gets published.
Step 6) Official English manga gets released on our site every Wednesday! Yay!
This breakdown does not include our marketing and website development teams who also work hard to make things happen on time. There are about 15 people on our International Team, not including freelancers and outside contracts. This is how we manage to get so many titles out each week compared to other bookstores who may put out only a handful of titles each month. I’m very grateful to have so many talented people working together to get so many wonderfully sexy manga out into the world.
The bulk of the content on Renta! is BL and Yaoi. Can you share the reasons why you’re publishing more of these types of works compared to anything else?
Renta! specializes in manga for a female audience, so on our main page you’ll find information for everything from Shoujo to erotica (Shoujo 2.0!).
The two most popular genres, Love and BL, are about even right now, actually, although BL is growing steadily as we continue to increase the number of titles we publish.
Interestingly, BL is much more popular in Japan than its straight love manga counterpart, but general erotica tends to do better in English just because it’s less of a niche market and easy to digest for people who just want a little fun romance but are not ready to become Fujoshi yet. (All they need is a little push.)
Since BL is also a bigger industry in Japan than love manga, there are a lot more famous artists with large fanbases. That being the case, I notice a difference in the level of “loyalty” of the fans – love manga enthusiasts being more like casual readers, and BL/Yaoi fans being a bit more dedicated, able to provide you with a complete list of their favorite artists and three good reasons why their favorite uke should have gotten first place in this year’s rankings.
How has the way the manga industry has changed in the past couple years affected Renta? Has it allowed them to pursue more BL and Yaoi?
With the industry becoming more and more willing to license manga into English, a lot more titles have become available to us.
Just two years ago we were releasing only 2 titles of BL manga per week. Fast-forward to a year later and that number increased to 6 titles per week, and in the short time I’ve been at the company til now, that number has jumped again up to 12 titles per week.
This growth has allowed us negotiation power to work with some of the biggest BL publishers, and we now offer many of the most popular mangaka and artists in this category, such as Tomo Kurahashi, Owal, Harada, Rihito Takarai, Kitahala Lyee, and lots more.
As we continue to grow, it’s my secret ambition to make Renta! known for having the best BL titles out there.
What’s been some of the more interesting aspects of focusing on this genre? For example, this tweet went around for a reason!
I looked over a Japanese application to set up a booth at a BL/Doujinshi event in Japan because I was curious, but now I am afraid my soul has left my body.
Here is a rough translation of some of the possible keywords you can tag your art and manga with: (see thread below)
— Renta! Yaoi (@Renta_Yaoi) February 20, 2018
Oh yes, the sub-genres, categories, and tags. Those can get wild, so don’t say you weren’t fairly warned.
Well. For starters, I can tell you that I’ve learned a whole lot of very situation-specific do’s and don’ts for those most intimate of moments in male/male relationships. My Japanese vocabulary for this particular topic is also alarmingly above what most people would consider normal. My sound effects vocabulary is also a bit on the unusual side.
I think one of the most interesting aspects of working with BL/Yaoi as a genre is the perspective it gives me on women’s sexuality, and how it differs from Western views and attitudes.
BL may feature relationships between male characters, but it is written mainly for a female audience. Actual gay men in Japan are NOT the target audience (although they are welcome, alongside their fudanshi counterparts), and there are a lot of very genre specific tropes that you won’t find in “real life” as it were.
When people find out what I do for a living, many guys will ask me why women like to read BL? “Is it the same thing as men watching lesbian adult videos?” I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t think it’s quite the same. It’s hard to explain, but I think as readers, we identify as one (or more) of the characters, and not necessarily the one on the “receiving” team. Women have been reading books dominated by male characters and voices for hundreds of years, so it’s no surprise that this is not a barrier to enjoying the genre. I think BL provides a space to explore your own thoughts on sexuality outside of the box that you came in.
Has the ticketing system you’re using been more of a boon for sales, or have you gotten feedback that it does hurt sales a bit?
Although the ticketing system is a bit unfamiliar to many people at first, in the long-run I would probably say it’s neither harmed nor helped sales.
Some of our manga is sold by the volume (what you think of when you imagine a printed book, with 5-8 chapters inside a bound volume), but many series are released on a weekly schedule. These individual chapters are often just $1 or $2 each.
Rather than forcing customers to charge their credit card or payment method over and over again for each chapter, the ticketing system allows people to “charge up” their account like a pre-paid card, and save themselves the trouble of paying separately each time.
As the site continues to improve and go through renovations, the ticketing system will eventually be replaced with something a bit more user-friendly. Until then though, I think once users get accustomed to the ticketing system, it doesn’t have a large effect on how much they spend. (That has more do to with their level of manga obsession than the payment system itself.)
What do you think you’ve personally learned as you continue to work in the manga industry?
Besides a very colorful vocabulary?
I think I’m in a unique position where I’m able to see both Japanese and English-language manga industries side by side. I want to take this opportunity to actively share Japanese culture with the English-speaking world, and vice versa.
Recently I’ve been learning a lot about how manga is made. Things are a lot different now than they used to be now that professional pen tablets have made digital artwork more common among artists. Manually applying screentone with box-cutters to unbound manuscripts may become a lost art someday, but this history gives manga its unique look and style, which is very different from the purely digital, often full-color style of webcomics that is gaining in popularity. Manga is a different beast and has an important place in Japanese culture. I’m looking forward to seeing how the new generation of artists will take this art form to the next level over the next few years.
What’s going to be next for Renta? I guess an example is you’re going to be publishing a few more Hakusensha manga?
Yes! We do have several Hakusensha manga coming out soon. We’ve also recently started working with some major BL magazine labels that I’m very excited about, and we’re always working towards licensing more and more popular titles. The more we grow and the better we do, the more comfortable it makes nervous publishers to license more manga in English, so I’m glad that things seem to be moving in the right direction.
As I mentioned before, we are also planning on attending more comic conventions in 2018 and 2019 to get more presence and spread the word that there are professional nerds getting manga licensed and translated as best we can. I hope to see fans there!
I also want Renta! to be more of a community space where people can have a safe place to connect with other fans and ship in peace. We’re currently working on this project and will probably be able to release a brand new community site before summer. I hope that as manga becomes more and more popular in the West, people become more interested in the art style, and that new artists will be able to learn how to make manga and publish original content, too. That’s definitely an important item on my long-term agenda. I’d like this community site to be one place for new artists to come and learn, too.