Miscellaneous notes

Let me tell you an old story.

I'm talking about the cover of "Reika is a my splendid maid".

This job was going well.

Except for one important part.

That was the face.

The image below is the final illustration that was rejected.

I have more than one rejected manuscript.

I've got 26 of them!

Look at that, a pile of dead data.

At this stage, the deadline for this job had already passed.

We decided that there was no point in worrying about it any more, and decided to finish the job.

The cover data for the publication was also completed.

If you have made it this far, this job is generally considered complete.

But I was still not convinced.

The expression on her face in this illustration was good.

It expresses her personality well.

If it were an illustration to be used in the text, for example, this would be fine.

I understood that, too.

But at the time, I had a hunch that this cover would not sell.

I don't know what to say...

This illustration is a niche, so to speak.

"Narrow and deep".

Cover illustration should be more "wide and shallow.

The best I could do at the time was to post the illustration on Pixiv and get the highest possible ranking.

This meant that I had to choose illustrations that would be widely supported in order to get votes from a wide range of users.

It was the end of the year, Christmas time.

Not a single page had been drawn yet for the book to be distributed at Comiket in a week's time.

Under such circumstances, I was fixing this illustration over and over again.

I don't even know what's wrong with it.

I don't know what's wrong with it, and I don't know where I can fix it to make it better.

But there is something wrong....

I was in agony.

The sensation I felt at that time was similar to the frustration you feel when you are under water and can't come up to the surface even though you can't breathe.

Looking at it again now, I don't think there's anything wrong with the previous cover.

In fact, I'm sure there are people who like the old one better.

It expresses her personality better.

But I can only say that after the results are out.

Before I published this book about Reika, my books were not selling well.

In other words, I was an unsuccessful writer.

So I was nervous about it.

This time, I couldn't make a mistake.

I can't deliver a work that I'm not confident in.

In the end, I completed the following illustration.

When drawing a beautiful girl character in a Manga in japan, a composition in which the bottom of the chin is visible is often avoided.

To be more precise, the jawline is deliberately not drawn.

This is because it often makes the character look ugly.

This is why it is so difficult to express the lower part of the chin.

The discomfort in this illustration was also due to the fact that the jaw line was not beautifully expressed.

So I changed the angle of the face.

In the end, I still don't know which was the better choice, the last illustration or the one I rejected.

However, the last illustration was well received.

As I had hoped, the ranking on Pixiv was high, and the book sold well.

In addition, the balance of the face in the last illustration became the standard for deciding the direction of my illustrations after that.

Another thing that awakened in me was the following belief.

"Stick with it, more, more. It will get better."

In the end, it was worth the trouble.

One thing I regret, however, is that even after all this hard work, I was paid nothing for this illustration.

In many cases, the cover of a book is not paid for.

It's a bad habit in the Japanese Manga publishing industry.

Then, In fact, this cover job was one of the reasons why I became reluctant to write for commercial magazines.

My editor didn't want to understand my distress.

"It doesn't make a difference. They're all the same. They're all the same!"

He didn't seem to understand what I was particular about.

Reasonably he might have done the right job.

But then I thought to myself.

He's not the kind of editor who responds to a writer's passion.

There would be no change in my work whether he was there or not.

Then there was no point in writing a serialized story for a commercial magazine.

This thought has not changed.