Re: Erotic Manga - Draw Like The Experts PDF.pdf Hit
Siri Vonbank
Lately I've been thinking that I don't know of a single novel that has illustrations in it. I've tried finding out the reason why, and came across an article published in The Guardian in 2011, but it didn't arrive to any conclusions or provided an explanation for this.
I come from a visual medium, so complementing the writing with visual aids seems pretty logical to me. I thought of two reasons why this isn't more common, first being that most writers aren't visual artists, which is reasonable, and the second that printing expensive, and pictures would increase the cost significantly. But in a situation where the writer also likes to draw / illustrate and is not bound by cost (an e-book for example), would there be any drawbacks from providing pictures with the novel?
There are exceptions to the "no illustrations" trend. For example, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrel is filled with black-and-white illustrations reminiscent of the wood engravings that would have accompanied 19th-century books. This is in line with the novel's general style, a tribute to 19th century literature.
However, in general, you are right - illustrations are rare, particularly in paperbacks. The issue, as you've guessed, is the price. There's paying the artist; there's printing the illustrations - ink costs money, particularly if you want coloured illustrations; there's arranging the pages so the illustrations fit in. In order for a coloured illustration to go in a paperback, it needs to be on a separate page of different paper quality; if the illustration is black and white, it still means more paper. All of those elements add up to make the illustrated book more expensive to produce. If you provide the illustrations, you eliminate one element here, but not all.
If a publisher is going to invest more money in an illustrated print, they need to know the investment will pay off. They need to know enough buyers would be willing to pay the extra cost to cover the publisher's expenses. With a new writer, that's unlikely to happen - a new writer is a risk as is, their books might not sell. Which is why you see illustrated editions of established writers, particularly of their best-known works. Examples are J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea. In both cases, the books in question have become a classic, so there's no risk for the publisher in printing hardbacks with coloured illustrations.
Books for young children --including novels --are almost always illustrated, and the younger the audience age, the more elaborate and central the illustrations. Middle grade novels frequently have at-least spot illustrations --and novel/graphic-novel hybrids like the Wimpy Kid series are not uncommon. Even young adult novels often have at least some illustrations, but it is rare in adult fiction. (The City of Dreaming Books series is a notable exception --it was illustrated by the author. However, it's a unique work, that would probably have been characterized as a children's book if it had been initially published in America.) There's also the occasional picture book aimed at adults, but these are very rare --Griffin & Sabine and Masquerade are the only two that come readily to mind for me.
The probable reason is that children demand illustrations in their books, but adults are perfectly content to read pure text. In other words, it's market-driven. There may be adult readers who like illustrations, but those pictures probably aren't selling extra copies like they are for children's books. That, in turn, means illustrations aren't likely to be something the publisher wants --they'd either have to be essential to the text or insisted upon by the author. In both cases, the author would probably already need to have some pull with the publisher --to either be a known seller, or to be considered an especially good bet. It's a similar situation with Author's Notes. Most publishers won't include these except as a favor to a well-known author. This may seem like excessive cheapness on the part of the publisher, but books typically have small profit margins, so shaving a few cents per copy can help.
Interestingly enough, adult non-fiction is more likely to be illustrated than fiction --perhaps the drier subject matter needs more help to be appealing! Also, as @Galastel mentioned, classic books are often re-released in lavishly illustrated editions. This is because there are already competing editions available, and the publisher needs something to distinguish their version from the pack (and potentially get book-lovers to shell out new money for a book that they already own). That's also why classics often get the full treatment in other ways --leatherbound editions, and so forth.
In general, @Galastel is correct; the problem is the costs. That said, the first Harry Potter Book by J.K. Rowling contains "illustrations", my copy of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" contains graphical signatures, symbols or handwriting on 9 pages. These are all black and white only; and typically no more than a quarter page tall. In at least one case the text says the ink is green, but the image is rendered as black text. I notice also they appear without anything to the left or right; so no text has to be flowed around the image.
That makes them "low resolution" graphics that do not require special paper, ink, or typesetting. Some care must be taken in formatting the book to ensure there is vertical space to present the image where Rowling intended; that can tend to leave blank space at the end of one page (the widows and orphans typesetting issue). This is probably why the images are kept short (vertically).
I believe I have also seen low resolution full page black and white maps at the front of books, or at the front of chapters. Again, these would be not special paper, and not hard to fit into these positions (no typesetting issues).
When illustrations require special paper this creates a collating problem; the special pages must be inserted into the book in the correct positions before the book is bound. The paper is also less porous, and the cheap glue used to hold regular pages can release the illustration pages.
Automating the collation without endless paper jams demands printing the book in sections that are then stacked together for binding. This is prone to error. That is why in many illustrated non-fiction books for medicine or science, we find all the illustrations together in a block, instead of dispersed throughout the book near the text that references them.
And finally, publishers tend to be very discerning consumers of artwork, their business depends on extremely high quality artwork that sells the book. They will pay $thousands for illustrations. Compare that to the typical advance given to a first time author, in the $3000 range.
Things like standalone B&W maps, or signatures, handwriting or handwritten filigree like Rowling produced, publishers can work around that in layout. But for actual illustrations they want an experienced artist they trust.
I will also note that if your book relies on illustrations for any kind of clarity, your audiobook and visually impaired audience just left the building. That is also something for professional marketers to consider, the reduced sales potential of a book.
1) The illustration quality is often poor - paperback books especially are rarely printed on high-quality paper, and the monochrome printing process tends to destroy any finer detail, especially when it comes to older books from the 70s and 80s
2) They can be physically difficult to view. Again, with paperback books in particular, pages are generally viewed "curved" thanks to the way they're all glued together. The only way to make a page flat is to break the spine of the book!
(The final point also applies to book covers - as I understand it, these are often produced by artists who may only have a brief description or a few sample pages from the book, and hence can be wildly inaccurate. A recent discussion over on Ars Technica, about the Wheel of Time series threw up the fact that one cover features a character who was later completely written out of the story!)
It's not just illustrations - I've read the Lord of the Rings books many times since I was a child, but I've never once made a serious effort to sing or recite the various songs and poems. In fact, I usually just skip them altogether!
Color illustrations are particularly a problem. Printing a color page is more expensive than printing a black & white page. So if there are color pictures in the book, do we print the whole book in "color", when in fact for 90% of the pages the only colors are black and white? That would greatly multiply printing costs. Or do we print just the pages that actually have color in a color process? But then we have to insert those pages into the right places in the black & white pages. Complicated and error prone.
I once wrote a software package for the Air Force that read PDF files of their technical manuals and separated out color pages and fold-out pages from the plain black & white, routed them to separate printers, and then produced what they called a "reproduction assembly sheet" that gave the printing people instructions on how to put it all back together. It was a gigantic pain for everyone.
Furthermore, as someone else briefly mentioned, even for an eBook or a print-on-demand book, you have to figure out where the illustrations go in the book. I've written several POD books that had charts and diagrams -- not pictures but they presented the same problem: You had to figure out what page to put them on and where on the page and how to flow text around them. This is a gigantic pain in layout. Then you edit the text, add one word or fix a spelling mistake, and the placement of all these illustrations could be ruined and you have to do it all over again. Microsoft Word says it automatically flows illustrations with the text. If this really works, I haven't figured out the trick.
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