CATDOLL: The miserable life of a Japanese cartoonist who only earns 6,500 yuan a year

Many people think that a cartoonist only needs to draw a dozen or so manuscripts a week, and then hand them in to the publisher, and then they can collect the royalties for this issue! When the amount accumulates to a certain level, they can also sell a single volume and further collect royalties. But is it really like this? It's not that easy!

Today, a cartoonist named Yamazaki Hiroshi (Yamazaki Minemizu) stood up and complained bitterly, hoping that readers would not regard everyone as Eiichiro Oda, and not think that every work would sell like "One Piece". The royalties for most cartoonists' single-volume books are really very ordinary, and they may even face the fate of being cut by the publisher. It is definitely not the beautiful world we imagine...

Yamazaki Hiroshi's work "Tokaido Tokaido"

Manga artist Hiroshi Yamazaki, who recently released the second volume of "Tekuteku Tokaido Nikemairi", seemed to be annoyed by being asked so much that he decided to come out and clarify that the royalty income of ordinary manga artists is not as good as imagined!

Calculation of royalties for One Piece

The royalties that a cartoonist can collect from a single volume are usually 5% to 10%, so assuming a single volume sells for 500 yen, a big-name author can collect 10%, which is 50 yen. Taking "One Piece" as an example, which can easily sell over 1 million copies, the original author Eiichiro Oda has an income of 50 million yen!

Episode 1 of "Tokaido Tokaido" released at the end of last year

However, Mr. Yamazaki himself was not so lucky. Although the first volume of "てくてく東海道ぬけまいり" published in November last year also adopted the model of the author taking 10% of the sales, the sales volume of 8,000 copies was far less than that of "One Piece". Calculated in this way...

The total royalties from the single volume are 400,000 yen! (about 20,000 RMB)

This single volume took Mr. Yamazaki about a year to draw. Even if the original manuscript fee is included during the serialization, it can't be said that he made money without doing anything. It can even be said that he was a little poor...

The second episode of "Tokaido Tokaido" has just been released

Now, one year later, the second volume of Yamazaki-sensei's "てくてく東海道ぬけまいり" has been published. The current print run is 5,000 copies, and the royalty rate has been cut to 5% this time, so...

Even if all the copies are sold, the royalty income is only 125,000 yen! (about 6,500 yuan)

Some netizens responded that cartoonists all had hard times before becoming famous...