February 3rd Live Webcast Minutes

[kozato]

In light of the technical difficulties that caused the recording of last Friday's webcast to evaporate, we're going to get some forum posting action going to fill everyone in on the topics discussed last week!

First off: Hello! ☆ﾐ(o*･ω･)ﾉ I'm Kozato, the social network and PR dude here at Digital Manga, and I'll be coming on board as the new host, alongside Ben.

Last week's topic was "Building a Brand" - a quick run-down of things you guys can do to go the extra mile and make your work stand out. Our hopes for DMG in the future is that fans will decide to buy books because your group worked on them.

Tips included
1) Of course this is a given (and we have no doubts in anyone's ability): but do good-quality work! Get your name out there as a group whom one can depend on for good translations and beautiful books!

2) Start a social media presence! Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, a blog, you name it. Post updates about the status of your books or teasers about your favorite pages (DMG groups are allowed to post up to 5 pages for publicity). Let people get to know you guys - you really are a unique presence in the industry!

3) And a tip that came up post-webcast - make sure people review your books! DMG Stardust brought up an excellent suggestion for distributing review copies of DMG books to people, and we're currently working on getting a system for that up and running! Give their blog post a read!

Everyone here at DMG is committed to promoting your work, and we don't expect you guys to do all the work for us, but we feel that utilizing both traditional PR and word-of-mouth fan channels will really help DMG books take off.

Questions that arose during the webcast Q&A:
- If anyone needs help reading calligraphy in your books (or needs help at all!) don't hesitate to contact someone here at DMP! We'll be happy to lend you guys a quick hand.
- Sales reports will be done by February 15th!

Apologies if I missed anything - hope this helps! (And sorry again for the technical snafu!)

[kozato]

OOPS, by "post up to 5 pages" I meant up to NINE pages + cover (or just 10 pages)

[Russesa]

Yes! Thank you for posting this! Sales reports, all right!

[ZepysGirl]

One of my problems with trying to build a brand identity is that we have a handicap that most traditional publishers don't have--- we are not allowed to pick our titles. Sure, yeah, we're all localizing yaoi at the moment, but there's a big difference between our recently finished Career Gate and our upcoming Yuri Sensei series. The former is clearly meant to have plot as an excuse for porn, while the other is much more about the relationship than the sex. These titles have two different audiences.

If I was trying to build an identity for our group, I would like the option to choose which end of the Plot-Porn spectrum our titles came from. Statements like "I like Purple Prose Killers because they always translate the hot stuff!" or "I like them because their books have great stories!" are impossible with the current setup.


Ah, and another thing I thought of for marketing our books: Add tags to them on Amazon. While I was looking up Career Gate, I was very confused by some of the tags that were already there ("high school" when it is set in the workplace...). Tags help people find similar products, so make sure your titles are appropriately tagged. Also, make sure your titles have pages on your online resource of choice. I found out that My Anime List didn't have a page for Career Gate, so I created one.

Oh, and going back to building a brand identity--- it would really help if our group names were included in the summary of the book. On both Amazon and eManga.com, our group name is on the credits page of the book itself, but does not appear anywhere outside of the actual book. This means that readers won't know it's ours unless they go looking for it. This would be really easy to fix, I'd imagine. Just add "Localized by PURPLE PROSE KILLERS" before listing who translated/edited/lettered it, which is already included at the end of the summary.

Similar to that, it would be really awesome if people could search for "Purple Prose Killers" on eManga.com and have our titles come up. I'm assuming this will be a feature on that new website you keep saying we'll get eventually?


Also, yeah, I would love to see a sales report. Glad to have a date on that.

[kozato]

In regards to adding group names to the book summaries - this is something that can be done very easily and quickly, especially on the emanga side! o7 Once I get the go-ahead, that will most definitely be implemented! An improved search function is also in the works with the new eManga website (as is a rating/comment system that I talked about with DMGStardust on twitter!) , so functionally should be shooting through the roof for you guys soon!

Amazon tags are also something I can easily help you guys take care of.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll definitely tweet something about adding tags to books to get the word out for our DMGers!

[TropicanaTina]

Yeah, those are all great ideas. Ideally I'd like the group name to be clickable on eManga, just as you can click on a mangaka's name or "DMG" to filter the results. As it is at the moment, it's pretty impossible for a reader to support a particular group without closely following DMG happenings. A casual reader has no easy way to discover all of a group's output. I mean, it's wonderful if a fan cares enough to keep up with DMG-related social networking sites and the like, but some may simply read a book, think "Wow, this book had a great localization!", and then have no clue how to pursue more from the same localization team.

[kozato]

I just got done talking to crayon about the new eManga website, and she said DMG groups will definitely be searchable - we'll have the group name on the book's information page, and clicking it will pull up all the books one group has localized, just like you mentioned. :3