Interview with tvm

Interview with TVM Publisher:


November 2nd 2014 

[ I have arranged an interview with the design, manager and pr marketing department of TVM comics the day before, asking if I could ask them questions related to graphic novels. They were happy and book me at 4 the day after]

Me: Hello I'm Kieu Minh Anh. I'm here because my school has a project that related to comic book, and I was very thankful that you guys can help me with that. Firstly can I ask you what type of comic book do you guys usually publish, and what genre do you guys tend to go for.
Interviewee : You can see we sell mostly manga, however we have other type of comic book and books too. We usually tend to go for Shounen manga ( boy genre, this includes action, detective, mystery, ... ) rather than Shoujo manga ( girl genre, romance, comics that revolves alot of heavy emotions ). We think this is because with Shounen manga, both boys and girls can read and enjoy it, but with Shoujo, boys usually dont want to read these love and deep romantic stories. However, we still publish both shoujo and shounen, and we always want to make the same balance out of it.
Me: Can you tell me specifically the process of publishing a particular comic book? What are the steps to get there.
Interviewee: Firstly we would see what's trending, and we will decide what graphic novel we would want to publish that we think it will sell out here or the customers will enjoy and buy ( because Vietnamese audiences are different than Japanese audiences ). We would also depends on the statistics of what sell out before and make a comparison. Then we would have to buy the copyrights of it from the company that publish it ( for example Full Metal Alchemist from Square Enix ), we will corporate with that company and they will send us the materials for us to translate in Vietnam and then we will print off the comic.
is the process and how is it done when you publish a particular comic book
Me: How do you guys translate and print off the comic?
Interviewee: Oh we have another department to do that, they usually do it on Adobe Photoshop. For printing the comic we send it to a printer shop to do it, we will choose the papers though. We use very high quality paper for our comics such as Australia paper or Dutch paper, for the edge of the book we glue it with milk glue. To make the pages connect well to each other, we need a clear order of the pages, and then we will arrange it as first page with last, second page with the second last page and so on..
Me: Have you ever considered printing Vietnamese comic books since all of the books you have published so far are mostly Japanese and foreign comics?
Interviewee: Yes we have been recently we think it's a good thing to discover new talents and bring Vietnamese comic to surface. We think it's an amazing thing to encouraging more graphic novel artist in Vietnam and support our own country.
Me: If you ever do would you reach out to the artist first or the artist have to to come to you guys
Interviewee: We would reach to them first, since we have never been published any Vietnamese comic before so they wouldnt know how to reach to us anyway.