Trying to start a manga magazine at school...

Advice?

Will give	5.0%	[ 1 ]
I got nuthin'	5.0%	[ 1 ]
OOH POLL!!!	65.0%	[ 13 ]
Something else	25.0%	[ 5 ]
Total Votes:			[ 20 ]

[evlkyubigrl]

Like the title says, I'm trying to start a manga magazine at school. I have mangaka, an editor, and a few people willing to clean up the pages and type out dialogue. I also have a way to get funds without charging for each issue (for now) and am planning to advertise at the anime club's convention in March. I have no idea what else I might need, how to set up the actual magazine, how to get copies out, or how to proceed from here. Any advice...?

[Rayqua]

Not sure what you want to do exactly, but if your school has a newspaper then you should consult them for printing or you could also include your work in it...
(if you dont have a school paper, then find a teacher who is willing to copy it)

[Darkly_Doomed]

Find a teacher that supports the idea, along with doing what the above person said. If your school is anything like my school, you will also have to figure out how to argue that this is a constructive/school related activity, though you could always just make them yourself unofficially.

[AurumCelest]

Some of the things that came into my head...

Who are you trying to target exactly?
Girls, Boys, people who already know manga, people who are new to manga and you want to introduce them?
Change your style depending on who you target. Obviously a guy wouldn't want to read a manga full of romance and angst and a newbie to manga might not understand some manga element
If you are trying to target as many people as you can are you going to create like a shonen jump? something with a lot of different type of manga thrown together? this would cause a lot of work for everyone though so :/

Story
Obviously once you have a target you'll need some thing to write about
or you can like brainstorm a bunch of stories, choose like 3 or 4 of them that everyone agrees upon, publish those, and ask the people who read it to vote on which stories they like the most on some website you create

Distribution
not too sure but i guess you can kind of set up a table and whoever is interested can come by and look?
or you can ask the librarian if you can leave a stack at the library and just let people take it if they think it looks interesting
give it to anime club and ask them to introduce it to their friends
if your school has like a facebook/tumblr/twitter/whatever you can upload some pages of the manga and ask to link those pages to the networking site

Money
Since you already have some way to pay for it this probably won't be a problem now
but depending on how big (how many pages) this magazine has you might run into some problem paying for printing
are you going to start a subscription or like ask for donation?

[evlkyubigrl]

Rayqua

My school DOES have a newspaper, but it went completely digital this year. I'm hoping to catch their leftovers, but I have no idea how to go about doing that. I'm still trying to find a teacher to help us because out of the teachers that I know can and will help us, most are already taking care of at least one other club, some aren't completely reliable, and the rest most of us don't like or get along with well enough to ask for help.

AurumCelest

WHOA O_o That's a lot!

We're more or less trying to target everyone, for two reasons:
1. To get a high enough readership that we can actually get money by selling rather than relying on school funds, leftovers, and donations, none of which are the most reliable sources, but are currently the only ones available to us.
2. The mangaka we have are interested in almost COMPLETELY different genres. Sure, there's some common ones we all like, but one likes and draws stuff along the lines of Code Geass, another prefers romance, I personally draw mostly dark psychological manga (despite liking action and comedy better xD), and others like and draw other things. This makes it so it's actually MUCH easier to just mash together a bunch of different manga.

Yeeaaahhh.... because of the widespread target, the utter lack of time we all have, and the sheer LACK of number of mangaka, we can all afford to just put together whatever (most likely 4 pages) we've got. Yup. All 6 of us.

ALL of us are in anime club xD We don't have a site yet, seeing as that costs money and we haven't fully decided on a name. We were already planning on doing the other things =D

We're mostly going to be asking for donations. If we have to become a club, most likely we won't be allowed to sell the actual magazine, so we'll probably sell something else to promote ourselves. If we don't become a club.... uhh.... any ideas on how to get enough money to print at least 1000 copies of a 20 page magazine by the end of March?

[AurumCelest]

Memento Mori...

...Remember your mortality

evlkyubigrl

Yeeaaahhh.... because of the widespread target, the utter lack of time we all have, and the sheer LACK of number of mangaka, we can all afford to just put together whatever (most likely 4 pages) we've got. Yup. All 6 of us.

Quality over quantity then, which could totally work. I mean look at Claymore. 1 chapter a month with each chapter being about 30 pages, more or less. Yet it has a pretty decent/strong fanbase. If anything at the end of your magazine you can put in a recruiting ad, unless you only want it to be the 6 of you.

evlkyubigrl

ALL of us are in anime club xD We don't have a site yet, seeing as that costs money and we haven't fully decided on a name. We were already planning on doing the other things =D

There are some places where you can create a free website and the interface isn't that hard to get a hang of.
(oh god I hope i
webs.com
wix.com (more photography then anything else but it can work)
and others that I can't think of now
worst comes to worst you can go to like tumblr, blogspot, livejournal and do your things on there

evlkyubigrl

We're mostly going to be asking for donations. If we have to become a club, most likely we won't be allowed to sell the actual magazine, so we'll probably sell something else to promote ourselves. If we don't become a club.... uhh.... any ideas on how to get enough money to print at least 1000 copies of a 20 page magazine by the end of March?

general money raising schemes of course
car wash, bake sale, sell old stuff, sell your body, asking for donation, etc.
either then that i have no idea
I'm assuming that you are going to go to a print shop of some sort rather then printing this at home xd

[evlkyubigrl]

AurumCelest

Memento Mori...

...Remember your mortality

evlkyubigrl

Quality over quantity then, which could totally work. I mean look at Claymore. 1 chapter a month with each chapter being about 30 pages, more or less. Yet it has a pretty decent/strong fanbase. If anything at the end of your magazine you can put in a recruiting ad, unless you only want it to be the 6 of you.

Yup, we're already planning for that~ ^.^ I was actually planning to have a lot more than 6 mangaka, but then they decided to make it monthly and 4 pages/manga, so now 6 is plenty for our current unknown budget! We'd still need editors and such, though...

AurumCelest

evlkyubigrl

There are some places where you can create a free website and the interface isn't that hard to get a hang of.
(oh god I hope i
webs.com
wix.com (more photography then anything else but it can work)
and others that I can't think of now
worst comes to worst you can go to like tumblr, blogspot, livejournal and do your things on there

(...unfinished sentence?...) For now, we're starting with a Facebook page, but it might be a bit harder now that we're merging with Writing Club (which apparently never became an official club...); I'm technically no longer the representative, and it'll be more than just us, and I don't want to risk the page getting taken down. One of the artists told me he's working on a tumblr, though, so that's good 3nodding

AurumCelest

evlkyubigrl

general money raising schemes of course
car wash, bake sale, sell old stuff, sell your body, asking for donation, etc.
either then that i have no idea
I'm assuming that you are going to go to a print shop of some sort rather then printing this at home xd

.................................... I did NOT think of the print shop thing Dx Thanks for that, I need to go whack myself in the head xd The other stuff will take preparation, but they can be done~ Thanks for the advice!

[peahat]

Helloooo,

Apologies if I missed something, but do you only have one mangaka? I think you might want a few more if you're running a magazine rather than just a manga. Also, if that one mangaka gets tired or burnt out, they'd need others to pick up the slack mad

[evlkyubigrl]

peahat

Helloooo,

Apologies if I missed something, but do you only have one mangaka? I think you might want a few more if you're running a magazine rather than just a manga. Also, if that one mangaka gets tired or burnt out, they'd need others to pick up the slack mad

Naahhhh, we got, like.... 6, or something around there (I lost track because some decided to be editors instead of mangaka around the same time we got more mangaka xD ) I'm working on recruiting more, but because I don't know how much money we've got, 6 actually might be too much for our budget.