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tl;dr: AnonBlack may not be able to afford importing Maoh every month. A desperate plea for small donations. Yamanko and SPS are coming. To the end of old series and beginning of new series. Our recent involvements with /a/ and /u/. And thoughts on the state of scanlation.

Though you really should  read more.

(Written by AnonBlack)

So I’m finally financially independent (save for college loans), which means every month I’m sitting down with my checking account and figuring out how much money I can spend.

The last few months have been really tough for me. I barely scraped by in November. December I used my spending money for gifts for my friends and family, and while I had four weeks off of school, I spent three and a half of them working eight hours a day to bring my account back up. January began with the only convention of the year, and late paychecks. Now, I’ve finally caught up, gotten my money for the winter break work shifts, and I’m at least $200 in the clear for next month’s rent.

I’m four months behind on Maoh, and I hate it, because I genuinely love all the series we do. So now that I have money, time to order mangos. And that left me in this situation.

I’d received a gift card for Amazon.com and was hoping to use it for the .jp order, but they won’t work cross-sites, apparently. So that was a good $35 or so putting the order in to the forwarding service. And according to my calculations here, it’s going to be a good $50-70 to ship it to my doorstep in a week or two.

But I did know this coming into the whole scanlation thing. If I want to do something monthly, that’s not popular, I’ve got to get the scans myself, and getting scans costs money. And for the most part, I don’t mind. Because I fucking love scanlating. Being able to bring the manga I love to other people who love it really makes my day, especially when people go out of their way to say “thanks”.

I want to keep doing this. But I know there’s gonna come time when I won’t be able to afford the $30 to import the magazine I want every month. Which is where I end the long spiel and begin the pandering.

Donations. I hate asking for them. But we do need them. A total of $15 a month would cushion the cost of importing the magazines enough for me to do it forever. In the past, we’ve had a lot of really generous people (especially from /u/) popping in and tossing $10, even $20 at us, and every time that money has gone to importation fees.

And no, we are not going to put ads on the site, ever. I feel uncomfortable putting any kind of advertising on our site. I didn’t start scanlating for money. I started because I wanted to give everyone quality translations at a reasonable speed. I keep scanlating because I’m able to share the things I love with other people. Not for epeen, not for money, not anything.

There’s been a lot of talk in the scanlation scene, and on /a/, about the whole MangaFox/Batoto/scanlator recognition thing. My 2¢ might not be worth much or even read in the debate, but here it is anyways:

Seriously. People are not going to come to your site and thank you, especially if you’re not doing something remotely popular. We were lucky enough to be relatively known when we were doing Shugo Chara, but even that didn’t get us a million pageviews each day. Sometimes it was even straight-up annoying when we were putting a release together, what with all the begging and pleading to work faster. And I can see how some people would take that as fans being “unappreciative” of work.

But I think it’s the opposite. When we put out a release, people went apeshit about both the release and what was in the chapter. People popped into IRC to watch us stream our typesetting and talked about the series and made friends. Honestly, it kind of amazed me, to see something I’d worked hard on being read and enjoyed. I didn’t mind that half the fanbase had no idea where their stuff was coming from. I just wanted people to love the manga. They don’t have to all come to the site and comment on each release saying “WOW THANKS” for me to want to keep doing this.

One of my favorite moments of 2011 was running into someone who read Femme Fatale. I was reading the raw of Volume 3 (before I’d torn it apart) during a break in class, and a guy came up to me and said how much he loved the story. I was so positively thrilled. Femme Fatale was something I skimmed every month when ripping out Yamanko and Tama Hiyo, something nobody in the U.S. knew about. And here I was running into someone who loved it as much as I did. That is why I translate.

So yes, I do get mad when groups complain about “nobody appreciating them” or that “nobody goes to their site”. Deal with it. That’s how the manga world works. Do you go to every scanlator’s website and thank them whenever you read fan translated manga? I don’t think so.

And yeah, I do get mad when groups complain about “nobody clicks our ads” or that “MangaFox makes all the money”. Deal with it. You’re not in this to make money, and you should have realized that this shit costs money to begin with. And shut up about MangaFox already. Without MangaFox, do you think a third of the readers would be reading it now, or visiting your site?

Anyways, enough about that boring shit. Updates.

Which brings me to this.

HEAVY OBJECT IS COMING BACK. HOLY SHIT AM I EXCITED.

Also on the way:

• Four more Yamanko chapters
• Four more Sayonara Piano Sonata chapters (SPS 8 is in the works at the moment)
• The last two chapters of Koibana Onsen (waiting on final typesets)
• Chapter 9 of Femme Fatale (in typesetting)
• “Ending” from I can’t tell anyone. (because /u/ asked for it ahead of time)

Also, we’ve teamed up with 4chan again on these projects:

• Endou-kun no Kansatsu Nikki (1-4) (with /a/)
• Puchimasu (with /a/, raw provider)
• Prism (with /u/)

To download, click here (Mediafire).

A woman struggles with her attraction to her adult cousin,

haunted by the games they played a a child.

Her sister finds love where she least expects it,

and views her surroundings through different eyes.

Two women find their secret lesbian relationship threatened by the world around them.

From the mangaka that brought you Femme Fatale, a collection of intertwining short stories!

To read a preview and download, click here and read on.

—————————————————————————-

To download, click here (Mediafire).

I counted wrong. There’s one after this and the epilogue. Herp. – AB

To download, click here (Mediafire).

Two more…

To download, click here (Mediafire).

To download, click here (Mediafire).

The final chapters of Koibana Onsen should be released within the month of January.

To download, click here (Mediafire). Many thanks to yuriproject.

(Blame Katawa Shoujo.)

We’ll be attending Anime Los Angeles from the 6th to the 8th of January as well.

To download,  click here (Mediafire).