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Hey Justin,

Great article, but I cannot stress enough what you said about DMG “giving creators with no experience opportunity to work on licensed manga”. The opportunity that they provide while at times may seem slow or un-organized is bar non THE BEST that you will find in the business (if not the only). It is near impossible for the average manga enthusiast to work for any of the other localizing publishers out there. Just try and find an email or submission procedure for how to work for any publisher and it’s like searching for ghosts in the machine. The only one I’ve received tryouts for is Seven Seas, and that has taken years of emails and updating my portfolio. I’ve determined the only way to work otherwise in the industry for $$$ is to simply be in the right place at the right time, luck of the draw. Waiting for an editor to “go fish” for a new letterer in a sea of submissions.

DMG’s guidelines and procedures are clear and concise enough for anyone to understand. And if a new localizer needs advice on “how to” it is readily available, especially among peer groups. But when it comes down to it, if you need a crutch for approval for every process in localizing, then you’re not doing your homework by studying the trade you have chosen to learn. Its up to you to figure it out and move on. But DMG is eager and more than happy to help. Their guidelines for localizing are improving greatly and concise enough for any new localizer to easily learn.

Let’s face it, localizing is allot of hard work. For both the publisher and the localizer. I lettered well over 3,500 pages in 2013-14 and finally made a “substantial” paycheck. But it took allot of hard work and dedication to the cause. I also publish 200-300+ page books outside of DMG on my own and running prepress can be an absolute nightmare formatting for each different distributor’s requirements. And I only have 5 distributors I work with. Imagine the cast of distributors and # of titles DMG deals with…

So give DMG a break, they’re doing the best they can with what they have, just like the rest of us. They’re doing something amazing for aspiring artists that would NEVER legally get the opportunity elsewhere. And refining all of this to a profitable takes time. They will figure it out eventually. Patience reaps great rewards…

My only real complaint about DMG is that their price points are much too high for digital books. I feel they would sell to a much larger fan base if their prices were lower for digital books. More fans paying less by far outweighs just a few paying premium prices (the Walmart model). And their free samplers could be more than the first 2-3 story pages, it’s a 200 page book for Pete’s sake, 5 pages isn’t enough to get past the credits. Give us 8-10% to see if we like it. Heck, give us a free book once in a while, they have thousands… Imagine the potential for follow up sales if they just gave us a few #1’s to get us interested…

Thanks again,
–Mike

Well yeah. Most other companies have standards. And, as far as I can tell, have limits too. When you have a list of upcoming titles in the DMG queue, it shouldn’t take 2, 3 years for a good portion of them to come out. They really should work on what they can work on, and also they should probably take down the list too. It’s not needed.

That said, it certainly is not easy to break into the field for other publishers.