Obtaining the license for a manga that one has dreamed of publishing since the creation of one’s publishing house is quite a victory. It is a publisher with stars in his eyes who explains to Linternaute.com how to exist as a small independent publisher, both with Japanese rights holders and French-speaking readership.
Three years after its launch – in the eyes of the general public – the independent publisher naBan is about to blow out its candles with great fanfare, with the announcement of a license that the publisher has coveted since its creation: Arion. How to build a catalog when you are faced with established publishing houses and much higher budgets? How do you exist in bookstores in a market that hosts several hundred new releases every year and half of whose sales are monopolized by less than twenty series? Christophe Geldron, founder of naBan editions, tells.
Linternaute.com: How did the naBan editions come about?
I had to leave the adventure of Black Box sooner than I thought and I had this feeling of not having gone to the end of what I wanted. This nagging frustration of not having been able to develop collections without being accountable. Over time it became an obsession: I absolutely had to try the adventure. And this even if I had no economic plan. It made it or it broke but I didn’t want to dwell on this failure.
When you arrive in a competitive, almost saturated market, how do you tell Japanese publishers that you exist?
This is where agents are crucial. Depending on the relationship you’ve had with them for quite some time, they know who you are. You can screw up, you can lose your company, it happens, but as long as you’ve been legit, then the door won’t be closed. It went very well with Shogakukan (Editor’s note: publisher of Shonen Sunday, which publishes among others Mitsuru Adachi, Rumiko Takahashi and Gosho Aoyama). I just wanted an appointment to work with them. We talked, they knew what I had done before naBan, I had worked with them, but they had accepted as long as it was a small title.
As they had already seen what I had done before, they knew that I was not going to do less well and that I could even improve. That’s how they opened the catalog to me.
What titles can we allow ourselves to look for?
Of course, we cannot claim the bestsellers in the catalog. I asked for three, four titles that I liked but weren’t absolute hits in Japan, and they told me they were available. I stopped on one Ask Modigliani. Having a title of Shogakukan, the smallest one, helped me a lot. This is a guarantee that other Japanese publishers can only appreciate. I had a lot of open doors thanks to the trust that Shogakukan and his rights agent granted me.
The manga market can sometimes have a very long time. How far in advance do you negotiate?
It will take about a year before a minimum release. The distributor in France must be notified six months before the release to add it to its schedules and engage in commercial actions with bookstores, so you must already have signed up six months in advance. You must always ask first if the license is available, then you must send an offer, which will be studied by the agents and then sent to the Japanese publisher. Sometimes the author is even involved in the decision. Then it remains to sign the contract and pay the copyright advance.
Sometimes it goes very quickly, I have signed contracts in less than a month, and others have waited more than a year… The titles that I have just signed have been in contract since December 2021.
What title is it?
I am pleased to announce thatArionby Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, will be released in France by naBan edition in 2023. In France, we know the anime version which was released by Kaze.
I thought I understood that this is a title that was particularly close to your heart?
It’s a title I’ve wanted for a very long time! I had even made a request from the conception of naBan to an agent but the latter could not find who had the rights. It’s been a while since it’s been reissued.
How did you manage to get the rights?
I had managed to find two integrals, in a small second-hand bookstore, during a trip to Nara. But the author was involved in his current productions and paid no attention to his past titles. This is the case with many mangakas. But in December 2021, I asked the agent to ask again via the original publisher if it was really not possible to negotiate the rights. And very well I took it because the author’s lawyer replied very quickly that the latter agreed. We had to be patient, because the contractualization between the author and the Japanese publisher took seven months. Then two months for us to sign a contract with naBan. Indeed, I had a rather special requirement, I absolutely wanted to start from this integral of 1986: large format with color pages. But they didn’t have the source files anymore, so I had to show them that I already had the physical editions and was able to scan them in good quality.
Earlier, you talked about two titles. What is the second?
Venus Wars, also by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko – called Yas by Gundam fans – but which is published by another publisher in Japan. That’s what was quite interesting. I had the impression that because I unlocked a first title, the other unlocked. It was almost a sign. As I had already said everything for the previous title, Yas’ trusted man knew about it.
For Arion it took eight, nine months; for Venus Wars it took a month and a half.
Arion will be released in April 2023 with a volume every three or four months. There will be three volumes in large format with pages in duotone and some in quadricolor. There will even be bonus pages. I’m very happy because the title dates from 86 and it has never been reissued like that in Japan. It will be the first time outside of Japan that it will be published in this format. We should have a price of around 20 euros for 400 pages for Arion and 450 or 500 pages for Venus Wars which will only make two volumes. Venus Wars will come out right after. We will provide the reprocessed scans that we have done to the Japanese publishers, it could be useful to other foreign publishers.
Do you get any money if another publisher uses it?
In general, they are given the scans for their editions. Often these are just that they are not reissued. This is also part of the good relationship we have with them. Japanese publishers charge for the provision of digital editions between €100 and €500 per volume. So if a foreign publisher is interested, it would not be impossible for me to receive a commission. But we’ll see if that happens.
Yas is very well known in Japan: he is a very important person in the world of Gundam. What draw are you going with?
For now, I challenge myself by printing this edition to 4,000 copies. I think that shouldn’t be too much of a problem. By having a large format, we will take those who really like manga, those who will want to discover a slightly more adult manga, when it is not at the base. There is also the fact that there are more and more young readers under the age of 25 who feel like they have missed a lot of things by not being there in the 80s, and are very curious and gourmets of this period. That’s exactly what I got with Destination Terra. I thought I’d make 1,500-2,000 sales and I’m at around 4,500-5,000 on volume 1. So don’t put aside the desires of young readers.
The economic model is changing, with the explosion in the cost of paper?
Absolutely. Paper has increased by 50% and I believe that eventually it will be 75%. According to some estimates, it should go down again because there has been speculation, but then came the energy crisis that keeps this price high.
I’m using a paper that is made at Stora Enso who said they were going to stop production. For now, prices for the manga have increased by 25%.
So of course that has an impact. I keep the old titles at the normal price and put the new ones at a price I think is the right one. This can sometimes be 50 cents or 1 euro more.
You should know that if I make consumers pay an extra euro, I only get 45 cents back. So, if the paper has increased by 60 cents, that would mean that I would have to make an increase of 1.20 euros, something that is not always possible.
We hit publishers a lot with regard to price increases, but we must also understand that we barely recover half of the amount paid.
Are there other reasons for these delays?
After the pandemic, publishers started buying titles like crazy, so agents were overwhelmed and Japanese publishers were overwhelmed as well. They favored large contracts with people they have known for a long time. Which is normal. I felt that I passed when they had time. For example, for a request I made a year ago, I just received a message asking me if I’m still interested in this title. It can also happen that the delays are linked to the author, if he is on a title in the course of publication and that they do not dare to disturb him.
Can response times cause imbalances in a catalog?
Always. As the Japanese sometimes take a long time to respond, whether on very big titles or more common titles, we are constantly forced to make offers. We always start on an average of two, three months for a response and a release in nine months. But it’s not always the case. Since October 2021, there have not been many announcements at naBan, because I had no answer and refused to release titles just to make turnover. All the requests I’ve made since last year have finally been granted, so I find myself with a lot of titles all at once which normally should have been distilled between 2022 and 2023 and which will all be released in 2023 because it will be necessary to make the contracts, to pay them and thus to recover money as quickly as possible. But this is a classic situation. That’s why around September, the publishers unveil the following year’s catalog to the press because they have almost everything ready to send to the printers. We can no longer be like before and go shopping once every three months. You have to be constantly anticipating and reacting.