Hello, everyone! This post is about the making of Fox Brothers Winter (狐里の狐兄弟 冬) from the Fox Brothers series, my first book that I’ve ever printed and sold! You can buy the book or have a trial reading here:
・Buy / 購入 (Amazon)
・Trial Reading / 試し読み
Since I’d never printed a book before, it took me several test prints and experiments before I was happy with the result. It took a lot of time and effort, but when the finished book came, I thought that it was totally worth it!
Including the trial-and-error, the book was put together and printed between May and July, taking a total of 3 test prints before I made the final print. It was my first time opening an Amazon account and selling online too, so I had to wrestle the system a lot to figure things out. Luckily, after a long bumpy road, I managed to put the book up in the store by 15 August and sold several copies!
I’d like to share my experiences here, so join me for the ride if you’re interested!
Making of Fox Brothers Winter
First Test Print
The printing service I used was 冊子製本キング. They have really cheap printing prices and you can print on-demand!
The full book was 104 pages long (including the cover), but since this was a test print, I printed only 24 pages to keep the prices low. It was my first time ever, so I wanted to see how the paper, color and print quality would look like. I hadn’t finished drawing the cover page at this point, so the one above was a placeholder.
When I got the printed book, the pictures and colours looked beautiful and I was excited! The text size looked good, too. But the book’s gutter being too narrow made it hard to read and it was a major problem. I also thought that using a matte cover would lend to the retro feel of the work, but it dulled down the colours and looked kind of unattractive, so I planned to try a gloss cover next time. The text on the cover and back cover were handwritten because I wanted to keep the playful, handmade feel. But when printed, they just looked messy, so I’d switch over to a printed text next.
Second Test Print
I finished drawing the cover, so I replaced it! At this point, I was still following examples from existing comic strip collections in Japan, such as ‘Tanuki and Kitsune‘. So instead of having an overarching winter theme for the entire book, the book was just titled ‘Fox Brothers 1’, and had various daily life comic strips in it. I also fixed the book’s gutter and asked for a gloss cover. The cover illustration looked kind of plain in the first test print, so I added some traditional pattern on the border.
When the book came, I was glad that I managed to fix the problems in the first test print. With the border pattern, the cover now looked more like a proper cover, so it was great! The gloss and printed text certainly made it look more professional, too. Even so, this version had its own problems.
The main problem was that while fixing the gutter, I added equal spacing to the rest of the areas around the panels, so now there was a lot of unnecessary blank space. I also tried using a thicker paper for the content, but it was kind of glossy and not really the feel that I wanted, so I’d return it to the thinner paper used in the first test print. For the cover illustration, I drew a huge Shiro and Kuro since they were the main characters, but the first test print’s cover had more details and looked more attractive, so I thought of returning it to that one.
So far, I’ve been doing all the drawing, editing and fixing the dimensions in Paint Tool SAI and Photoshop. But not knowing how many more test prints it would take, and considering it would be too difficult to fix 100 pages, I decided to move everything to Clip Studio and work there. Clip Studio had a multi-page comic function, rulers and guidelines, so things should be much easier to manage!
Third Test Print
Real life got kind of busy, so I was a little slow, but I managed to get to the third test print! I fixed all the sizes and positioning by using the first and second test prints as reference. (I didn’t use matte or gloss on the cover this time to save a few coins. Pfft!) When I got the finished printed version, everything was finally perfect! Working on it in Clip Studio certainly paid off!
At this point, I could’ve gone to print the final version and called it a day, but something was gnawing at me. As a comic artist who had been working on long stories with plots so far, I couldn’t stand not having an overarching theme in the entire book after all! (The randomness! It’s scary! XD)
I knew I’d have to probably spend another month to redraw half the book if I were to choose a theme now to make things work. But better late than sorry! So I thought up a theme and how to best package my first book, and then I started working on it.
Final Version
After a lot of struggle and working on it everyday, I finally did it! I chose ‘Winter’ as the theme of the first book since spending time frolicking in nature and enjoying it was a big part of Fox Brothers. It’d also be fun to package the story into 4 books (one for each season) in total! I drew around 30 new pages to make the content fit the theme. Happy with the content and quality, I then sent the final 100 pages for printing.
Since I wasn’t particularly a popular artist, I thought that I’d start small with selling only 20 copies on Amazon. I also wanted a few extra copies to keep for myself and give to my family, as well as sell by myself if I ever have an exhibition. So I ordered a total of 40 copies. The picture below was how the final version looked like when it arrived!
During the test print with only 24 pages, the book’s spine was super thin, so I never managed to test the spine design. So naturally, I misjudged the measurements and messed up (Oops)! But other than that, the book was freaking perfect! If you have the book and it has this little mistake, remember that it’s one of the first 40 copies with the biggest amount of sweat and tears put into it. It’s a special, novelty good!
Packing and Selling Online
Setting up an Amazon Account
Packing and selling the book online were their own huge bag of work!
I chose Amazon as my online store since most people have an account there and it’d be easy for my friends and potential customers to use. Despite Amazon being a major site though, I found it horribly hard to use as a newcomer! I had to look up a lot of tutorials on YouTube and run into a million problems before I managed to even set up the account. Luckily, I managed to set it straight and get it up and running! (The whole goose chase)
Another thing I found quite unsatisfying was that by now, Amazon’s individual seller option was practically useless since they removed a lot of the functions. My book was an unlisted new product, so I couldn’t even put it up on sale unless I join their monthly professional seller subscription… T-T
Problems that were uncalled for and that I couldn’t have known unless I gave it a shot. Counting Amazon’s fees, I knew that my final sale would pretty much be a loss, but since I’d come this far, I decided to go through with it till the end! If anything, I wanted to use this as a chance to see the whole process so I can plan my sales better next time!
Packing
So after listing my products, I looked at tutorials to see how to pack my books and sell them. I work full-time, so shipping the books one by one by myself would be difficult. To solve that, I decided to use Amazon FBA (Amazon would be the one shipping for me when someone orders a book). I bought plastic pockets to pack my 20 books in, printed the Amazon labels and stuck them on the pockets and then successfully shipped them to the closest Amazon warehouse!
Publicity
Naturally, I’ll need to announce that the book was on sale. So I made a poster and announced it on my Twitter on 15 August!
I really wanted to thank the people supporting me by buying my first book, so I included an illustrated postcard of Tenko-chan and a handwritten message as a bonus! (The picture used)
Extra
With the book on sale and announced, I’m glad that I made it till the end! My friends were happy for me and I was thankful to them. They bought some copies and reported that Amazon FBA sent them the books smoothly. Nice! I thought that that would be the end of it, but I ran into another problem because Amazon… TuT
While my friends in Japan successfully bought the book, my friend in Singapore couldn’t. I had enabled FBA Export, so we had no idea why the book couldn’t be shipped to Singapore although it said it could ship to the U.S.. We tried various ways such as making an Amazon Singapore account and listing the book there, and setting up a Payoneer account to see if it worked. But our two-week effort was to no avail. Looking further into the problem, I eventually found a hidden page that said that my product category was ineligible for FBA Export from the start… (How I wished this page was easier to find!! I really hope Amazon would be easier to use in future since it’s such a big site and they have the money T-T)
So in the end, I just took a few of the copies from my stock at home and shipped those to my Singaporean friend manually.
Conclusion
As of now, I’ve successfully sold 12 copies on Amazon + 6 copies from my stock, so a total of 18 copies! I’ll see if I can clear out the remaining 8 copies on Amazon with a little publicity. (I swear Amazon is eating all my referral fees for free! I’m doing all the referring by myself XD)
Not much, but good enough for a start. Thank you so much to everyone who purchased my book and helping me complete the first cycle of my journey. Making my first solid book was quite exciting! Successfully putting it up in the store and watching over it until it arrived safely in the hands of my customers required a lot of grit, but I was happy that my work could bring some enjoyment to the world. It was a crazy and worthwhile first time experience, and I hope to do even better in future!
That said, I’m planning to try Kindle after this once I have some time. Then I’ll compare the two and see which one works better for me. I’ll do my best! See you again, fellow adventurer!
