Hi Everybody,

Thank you all for making the launch of our subscription service go so smoothly last month. We were very happy to see so many of you come out and support our community and help make the transition as smooth as it was. We are very grateful to have such an amazing community that helps grow MangaMagazine.

This was also a very exciting month for us as we moved into our new office! Check out a panorama of the decorated office! We're still waiting on delivery of our Rock Band set ;) You can expect lots of exciting things to come from our new engineers in the next few months!

To show you how serious we are in our beliefs of helping grow the web manga and comic community, we are extremely excited to announce the creation of a USD $20,000 Monthly Premium Author Sponsorship Pool!  We have been working and debating about this for quite some time and are very happy to finally roll it out!

So what exactly is this pool?

1. Each premium author will be paid a portion of the $20,000 pool each month based on the traffic they bring to the site.  Traffic will be calculated as a mix of page views and unique visitors.  Bring in 10% and you get $2000.  Simple!
2. Each premium author will be paid a minimum of $150 no matter how much traffic they bring in.
3. You give up ZERO content, distribution and any other rights.  There is NO CATCH here from a content rights standpoint.  We do not own any of your rights and you can take your content elsewhere whenever you wish!  No fancy legal agreements, nothing!

What are the terms and conditions?

1. You must be a premium author
2. You must have published at least 15 pages for that month (cover and content pages.  Ads/copyright don’t count).
3. As a premium artist, your content is subject to the subscription wall.
4. That’s it!  We are not joking about this being no strings attached!

Why are we doing this?  I can promise you we haven’t received a flood of subscribers in the last few days to justify such a large pool.  In short, it is because we believe in you.  We believe in this amazing community!  We believe it is the right time to invest to make MangaMagazine the single destination on the web for amazing web manga and comics.  So we are putting our money where our mouths are!  We also believe this system is a much simpler and less complicated method than signing a long legal agreement then agreeing on distribution rights, payments, etc etc!  We want to make it so irresistible for you to stay with us that there is no logical reason for you to go anywhere else!

If we missed anything please do not hesitate to contact us!  We would really appreciate your help in re-tweeting, re-blogging, anything to help get the word out of this pool!  Let’s get all the forums and bloggers talking about this!  The more people we get interested in this the bigger we can make this pool!

If you have additional questions, do make sure to read our FAQ!

This month's featured pool is a fascinating collection of authors who have been with us for some time now as well as new authors that recently joined us. We hope you like this great group of new featured authors as we are so excited to see what happens in the future with this great selectino of genres and styles!

Faerie Gari by Zelkats	GAIA by Novil	Leth Hate by Leth Hate	Marooned by Tom Dell'Aringa

Morning to Moon by Runcible	muZz by FSc	Prague Race by LEPPU	Witch's Quarry by Wulfmune

This month, I am taking a backseat to highlight Vervain’s recent article describing how fans of a comic may not necessarily be following or reading the comic. The essay talks about how to interact with those who are genuinely interested in your work. It is a must read not only for comic and manga artists but also for writers, designers, bloggers, video bloggers and just about anybody putting content out on the web. If not for its positivity then read it for its numerous suggested activities that can help in reaching out to your reader base.

    Comic strip by Vervain

Not surprisingly, there is an increasing number of similar activities being run by artists on MangaMagazine. I spotted four contests a few weeks ago. There were definitely similar events in past months but at the time there were not as many that I know of. Actually, right after posting these events, Wave announced an Original Character themed art tournament that is sure to produce interesting results.

It is amazing to see members actively trying out ways to engage our fast growing comics and manga community!

Have an idea for next month's article? Send them over to powil<at>mangamagazine.net. Until next time, happy comicking!

Powil