Do you have what it takes to be a manga-ka? If you’ve personally asked yourself this question while dreaming up stories and drawing in the margins of your notebooks, perhaps you might be willing to take a chance and live out the dream.
Dream Manga, which began in 2007, is comprised of a small group of people who have turned their passion for manga into a potentially rewarding endeavor. Reuel Smith and Rendi Lea are both young manga-ka that have managed to not only create their own manga but sell them as well. Neither are houseshold names by any means at this point in time, but perhaps someday they will, along with the rest of their Dream Manga group.
The main focus of their panel was sharing their experiences in how to create and publish your very own manga for others to enjoy. Things such as finding a potential audience for your manga (popular sites such as smackjeeves.com, DrunkDuck, and Tokyopop are where many DIY manga-ka go for advice as well as feedback on their own stories), what programs to use (Manga Studio EX and Comic Works are two examples), what sizes and resolution one should set their pages to (600 DPI is for the best results) and a slew of other options.
For printing options, Reuel went with the option of finding a publishing house to print his work (very expensive as books are printed in bulk but are professional-looking) while Rendi went with a DIY method (cheaper but more time consuming). Rendi went into detail about how she personally prints her pages & covers and binds her book using nothing more than some glue, wood, and clamps to hold the book in place as everything is bound together.
Once the book is completed, the pair talked about how it’s important to copyright and trademark your creation (to prevent theft), advertise your work, and even how to secure a barcode and ISBN in order to get places such as Barnes & Noble or Borders to carry your work. Mostly a Q&A session for the most part, the pair were rather frank on providing the best advice they could in order to help out other potential manga-ka as well as provided a handout on some helpful links.
More information about Dream Manga as well as some tutorials on their different self-publishing processes can be found on www.dream-manga.co.nr/
------
[...] SOURCE: http://inside.anime-expo.org/ax-scoop/2010-07/living-the-dream-ax-2010/ [...]
[...] to because they were held on Thursday (Opening Ceremonies, Gundam: the Panel, Fanfiction Writing, Self-Publishing for Online Mangaka, and Origami) or Sunday (Do Anime Conventions Have a Future?, Habits of Successful Anime Podcasting [...]