(Note: Names with an * near them indicate that I interviewed people who would prefer not having their real name shared in this article)
After not getting paid during the July-December period for her localization work two years ago, Karin* explained that she sent emails to her Digital Manga contact 4 times in one month. With the last email exchange, Karin was told she would receive payment that night.
She received it 12 days later.
This wasn’t the first time this happened, and Karin wasn’t the only one it happened to.
For some background, this livestream from February 2014 explains exactly the process of getting paid by Digital Manga if you’re in the Digital Manga Guild, and it sounds simple enough. There are two payment periods:
- January to June
- June to December
Towards the end of the term, the company files an Earnings Report for each localizer, which states what titles were released, how much that title made, and the percentage of those earnings — all information that would then be sent within 60 days of the end of the term. If $100 was made, a check will be sent out in 90 days. If not, payment rolled over into the next period. Yoko Tanigaki, in the video above, mentions that out of 726 people (note, this was in February 2014), 259 would get a royalty check, meaning the titles sold made money. One localizer happened to work on enough books to make $1,800 over that period, for example.
So, for example, if a translator worked on titles from January to June 2014, they should expect to get an Earnings Report sometime between the end of the term in June to August/September. If a localizer earned royalties then that check would be expected sometime from the end of the term to September/October.
It worked this way for a while, and then it stopped working.
For Karin*, she experienced more trouble with royalty checks and Earnings Reports being sent to her. In fact, it got so bad she had to reach out on Twitter multiple times for information. When she finally did receive one past check, “There was an error on one of them that resulted in me getting shorted some money.” Whenever she would send an email, she would occasionally get a response, or be replied to with a one sentence line that didn’t result in immediate changes.
That one sentence line was the last she heard from DMP a few months ago, and, in her words: “I don’t know if I even have the energy to start nagging them and start up the whole cycle of frustration all over again.”
Karin* is not the only one who has had a problem with DMP. Barbara, who translated titles such as A Convenient Man, Yes It’s Me, and Welcome to Nyan Cafe! for DMG, had not gotten her Earnings Report nor received her royalty check since last year. She’s no longer working for them after 3 of her scripts were rejected, and they weren’t timely rejections as paperwork continued to get delayed. “If they’d handled things in a timely fashion,” she mentioned, “that would have been different, but they delayed some of the paperwork for months, so our submission was delayed, and in the end it was a total waste of effort.” Like Karin*, getting information was a challenge: “They claimed there was a problem with the e-mail, that the reports had been sent but were lost. I never believed that, considering how the Earnings Reports continued to be slow and now non-existent.”
Numerous localizers mentioned the same issues: late contacts, lack of resources as a small company — reminder, this is the list of titles they apparently have the rights to localize for the Guild — and an apparent lack of organization. One localizer (who still works for DMG), Jaime*, stated that while they have gotten better at keeping track of payments, she hasn’t asked for a DMG title since Fall 2014, simply preferring to work on Harlequin titles because of faster payment. It’s even rougher for those who’ve worked at DMG since the start, as she let me know she didn’t even see her first revenue check until it was almost her 2nd year after working on 8 titles. “The revenue share from before was only worthwhile if you did 2-3 of the jobs per title,” she mentioned, “as a 12% share gets split so the translator, letterer, and editor get paid equally.”
In other words: Money has been lost, with little sign of being paid back.
***
Ana* translated 4 manga titles for a year at DMG. She admitted, along with a few other localizers, that she understood she was getting into work that would get her industry experience. “I do think the experience was helpful to get me used to working in a collaborative professional environment involving localization.” It was also a way to get her name out there on published works, so, the payment system wasn’t too big a factor for her.
What she didn’t expect was that localizers essentially had to do all the work themselves to a much larger extent than anticipated. “It was the localizing team’s job to promote the titles they worked on if they wanted to sell more,” she stated, which is normally not the responsibility of the team working on the manga, “or it was luck of the draw as to whether or not your team was assigned an anticipated title that would sell well regardless of promotion.”
But of course, the payment system is based off manga selling well, so there’s more of a chance for localizers to get squeezed on payments than making money. But the overriding theme of DMG is simple: they’re hiring people with no experience to do manga work. They’re very serious about that, as this article details in 2012 by Melinda Beasi:
Before signing on as an editor with the Digital Manga Guild, I had exactly no experience editing manga. While I think it’s clear that DMG’s targeted labor pool was the scanlation community (perhaps specifically the BL scanlation community), I came in with no background as either a professional or a hobbyist. With that in mind, it may be unsurprising to hear that my first major realization as a new DMG editor (with four deadlines suddenly looming near) was just how little I knew what I was doing.
My second realization was that I was really on my own. There was no managing editor to go to with questions or to catch my mistakes. There was no one to mentor me through my first manga editing job. Translated scripts were simply filling up my inbox, and I had to figure out something to do with them. It reminded me of the stereotypical theater dreams that haunted me (and every young actor) for years, in which I’d find myself opening a brand new show, though I’d never learned my lines or attended a single rehearsal. Only now, the clock was ticking and the consequences were real.
So, does that excuse them from generally being unorganized? From not keeping track of payments? This is where you might think a change in payment structure is warranted. Contrary to this ANN report however, they’re not changing their payment structure.
“The ANN article actually misquoted us,” said Viannah Duncan, the Marketing, Events, and Tradeshow Coordinator at DMP via email. “The DMG payment structure stays the same as it always has been, but we have added a new team DML (Digital Manga Localization) which has members that are paid up front.”
So until more information is released (I have followed up about this new team), the payment structure will stay the same until further notice.
