Steady Beat creator Rivkah reports on her LiveJournal that her editor told her Tokyopop’s non-licensed material won’t be published, but will now go straight to the web:
Just got off the phone with my editor, and it looks like not-so-good news for Steady Beat. In fact, it looks like not-so-good news for anybody who’s working with TP right now. I’m not sure how much I should say for fear of causing an outright panic with other creators, but essentially, nearly all of Tokyopop’s future books will be going straight to web. This wasn’t a case-by-case scenario. Neither I nor any other single creators were singled out. It looks like the whole line of non-licensed material will cease printing and be promoted online only.
However, this does not mean “Steady Beat” will never see print. Borders on the verge of bankruptcy hurt a lot of people, but it doesn’t mean the end of the world. There are other publishers, other outlets, other venues. Tokyopop could in the future still print the third volume of Steady Beat.
In spite of this potential, however, I am going to try to negotiate print rights back from Tokyopop until such a future time as they choose to bring my books back in print. In the meantime, should Tokyopop fail to follow through with their promise of at least web print, I will put full “previews” of all the books online myself.
June 14th, 2008 at 8:15 am
While I pity some of the great-looking OELs getting nerfed from print to measely web… I do have to say that a lot of the OELs that Tokyopop blindly signed up and printed DO deserve to get the demotion to web. There are quite a bit of OELs that do suck. At the bookstores, those are usually the manga books still in pristine condition. Whereas, the good OELs do tend to get read a lot and misused.
Anyway, my point is, its a shame that Tokyopop is pushing all their non-licensed materials to the web. I feel that they should still print the ones that are great and do bring in the good considerable numbers… not in orders but good numbers in sell-through at the stores. A lot… and I mean A LOT of OELs really suck and they end up just collecting dust at the bookstore shelves. Hell, even comic book shop owners just end up giving the bad ones away for free since they cant even sell them for a buck.
Oh well.