26730


People always say they buy stuff of a certain series to support a certain
mangaka. Now it made me wonder how much actually goes to the mangaka himself.
Do mangaka usually work for a publishing company like jump for example or do
they work independent selling their copies to the company?

I assume for every Tankobon copy that is sold, the managaka gets a big share,
because it is made by himself, but how does this work for other merchandise
like anime, toys, tshirts, games or maybe even events? These things are made
independently from the original mangaka by a different company, so does he
still get a percentage in every sale of every article sold or how does this
work?


CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-10-20T10:41:04.607
26724
2015-10-21T14:06:57.217
2015-10-20T13:06:20.000
6166
6166
question
culture mangaka
How much do mangaka profit from anime or merchandise sales?


This is very dependant per mangaka. And all tough there is a thriving
independent market for manga, it is rarely a solo effort. Hence most of the
mangaka start off as either an assistant, or manage to get a contract at a
well known publisher. Now, as for how much they earn, lets take [Eiichiro
Oda](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiichiro_Oda) as an example. He has been
estimated to earn around [2 billion
Yen](http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2010-12-22/magazine/one-piece-
creator-oda-made-2-billion-yen) _($~24 million)_ based on royalties alone.

## Now how is this amount built up?

**_Contract and Royalties_**

Most mangakas don't earn an hourly wage. Instead, they have a contract based
employment with partial sales (royalties) agreement. This means that a mangaka
makes XX amount of pages per month for a set price. For a starting mangaka,
this is around 500$ for 20-40 pages. On top of this, they still earn their
royalties, which is around 10-15% per tankobon. These tankobons sell around $5
each which would make ~$0.50 a tankobon. Given that it takes around 5 hours
for a page, we can say that an average starting mangaka earn about 5$ an hour.

This brings me to the pretty well known fact that mangakas tend to have a
second job. As for a starting mangaka, it is not sufficient to pay the bills.

**_Series becomes an anime_**

Lets say the given manga became a success, and became well known enough to
create a anime. This would mean that our mangaka gets roughly ~$660 per
episode. So a standard 1 cour anime would earn just under $8000. **But they do
not get royalties for the DVD/BD sales**. The royalties for these go to the
sponsors and publishing companies. Most of the time the mangaka does not even
have a say in the production of the anime, and the anime is only made to
promote the original series and earn the publishers/sponsors money.

**_Character goods_**

Now another profit factor for most mangakas is the sales of character related
goods and products. Most of the time, this is also covered in the same
contract as mentioned above, meaning that the mangaka also earns 10-15% of the
remaining anime retail, as most of these products tend to be a lot more
expensive.

> Character goods earns around 8.5 times more then sales of movies, DVD's and
> VHS combined based on the [American market in
> 2009](http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2011-04-15/america-2009-anime-
> market-pegged-at-us$2.741-billion)

**TL;DR**

It is estimated that a mangaka earns about 10% royalties over their product
sales, excluding DVD/VHS/Movies/BD. Leading to ~$0.50 per tankobon and ~$0.05
- $20 for product sales such as figurines, key chains etc,etc. Which, for
successful mangakas, can turn up as high as **2 Billion yen** (1.29 Billion
tankobon royalties, 749 million character good royalties).

Sources: [crunchyroll](http://www.crunchyroll.com/forumtopic-853693/ever-
wonder-how-much-money-mangaka-make),
[AnimeNewsNetwork](http://www.crunchyroll.com/forumtopic-853693/ever-wonder-
how-much-money-mangaka-make), [Yahoo
Answers](https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20130828095304AAkjLRo),
several Wikipedia pages.


CC BY-SA 3.0
2015-10-20T21:30:03.907
26730
2015-10-21T14:06:57.217
2015-10-21T14:06:57.217
11083
1458
26724
answer