Get ready to see MY comics in Yen Plus, bitches! Err well not really, but I like the idea of it- Japanator editor by day, deadline pressed manga-slave by night....wow, that sounds stupidly exhausting.

Are you a professional artist working in a style heavily influenced by manga? Then YEN PLUS wants to talk to you! One of the primary aims of a manga anthology is to help to develop talent at a professional level, and YEN PLUS is no different. Going forward, we are going to be featuring short stories commissioned from professional artists and developed with the YEN PLUS editorial staff in the magazine. The goal is to give creators a feel for working with us (and vice versa), a sense of the experience of serialization in a monthly anthology, as well as exposure to a broad reading audience.

It's worth pointing out that this is not intended to be a "pitch" for a long-running manga series. This is simply an exercise. YEN PLUS would likely request, among other things, first serial rights for inclusion in the magazine, the rights to display the work on our website promotionally as well as the first option to develop the concept with you into a longer project in the event of an enthusiastic response to the work. (It may not be a pitch, but you never know...SOUL EATER started out as a short story just like this!

Interested? Here's what you need to do: Send a proposal for a 30 page manga story along with 5 to 10 completed sequential renderings of that story to the editorial staff of Yen Press. 

Submissions may be sent to yenplus@hgbusa.com.

The immediate reaction of many people may be to remember how poorly most of Tokyopop's forays into the realm of OEL manga went, but I think Yen Plus has sidestepped many pitfalls with the way they've worded this. You'll notice that they claim first rights to your work, not exclusive ones. I don't strictly remember the legalese of the Tokyopop contracts, but I know that exclusivity was definitely an issue.

Furthermore, rather than asking for an entire project for potential publication, they're asking for something much easier to produce; a proposal, and about five pages of manga. In fact, "sequential renderings" doesn't necessarily mean pages either, so you could theoretically do LESS than five pages and still be eligible. To me, this makes a big difference, because I hate it when publishers ask for a completed project, with specific requirements, that they're 99.999% likely to reject. In this scenario, even if Yen Plus has no interest in your story, at the very least you haven't invested time into a full project that you now have no use for- it's not like there are a helluva lot of other places where you could submit a 30-page manga if YP turns it down, and clearly they're aware of that. Basically, they're being respectful of the artists' time, and I dig that.

They also say that they will soon hold a talent search for non-professional artists, so budding mangaka who might not be quite ready for prime time needn't worry. Of course, the line between professional and non-professional is a bit nebulous in this field; there are very, very few professional OEL manga artists, and several among the group work for Yen Press already. If they mean amateur manga artists who are nevertheless professionals in another realm of art, that's also a very hazy distinction; I was a professional graphic designer at one time, does that make me a professional artist? If I've sold one piece, doesn't that technically make me a professional artist? Or do I have to sell at least five first? Obviously, the fact that this is a complicated distinction cannot be blamed on Yen Press whatsoever, but I wonder if the submissions they'll get for their "talent search" will really be much different from their normal submissions.

Y'know, I really shouldn't have even told you guys about this at all, because now there's more competition for me. Um, you know what? If you want to submit, you should TOTALLY put some tracing paper over a volume of Naruto and send that in; I hear Yen Press just LOVES that sort of thing. See, I'm always looking out for you guys.