Some people may wonder why we chose the way of self-publishing instead of going through a “proper” publisher. There are a number of reasons for this.

First of all, you don’t get very far in the publishing industry if you don’t have some kind of connection: the number of manuscripts received is so high that 90% of them are automatically discarded. Worse, the selection process is flawed. Recently someone in the UK sent to five publisher a copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice without the author’s name. Four out of five refused the manuscript without even looking at it! Only the fifth noticed what it was.

Second, the genre of illustrated novel is not very popular outside Japan. True, there are a number of translations of famous novels such as Slayers, Shakugan no Shana, Boogiepop wa warawanai, but most of them didn’t perform too well sales-wise. Add this to the fact that we are inspiring to the Japanese works (but with our own style, not that inspiration is bad by default) and chances are even more slim.

Therefore, why not taking the chance of publishing it ourselves? Please remember that the means of publication mean nothing about the content: anyone could put up a book on Lulu.com, but each case has to be valued individually. As for us, we tried our best not to be sloppy (though some errors slipped in Lost Innocence, thanks to those who reported them!), having someone (Melissa Adkins) design the cover and two English teachers (Dr. Alessandra Frigerio and Dr. Vilma Bettoni) to do the grammatical corrections.

The end results are two books (with a third coming out). If you want to take a look, feel free to. Just don’t shun them because they’re self-published.