Witch Academy (1)
"It's dooone…"
After pouring endless hours into the work, the manuscript I'd been grinding through all vacation was finally finished. A little polishing, then I could take it in and get a sample run. I was a bit sleepy, sure, but submitting it was something I could still manage.
"What, you still haven't gone to bed?"
"Ah, yeah. I got completely absorbed in the work."
"The art's fine and all, but you need to sleep properly. It's vacation. What are you doing living like you're still going to school?"
"Oof… you're basically Nia right now."
Somehow, once vacation started, Rosaria had slipped into the mom role in Nia's place. She told me breakfast was ready and that I should eat before doing anything else, then headed out of the room. Still, with the work in its final stretch, I'd had no choice but to push this hard. Ideally, I wanted this one published before I went back to the Academy.
"I always think this, but you really do live for comics, Cali."
"Well, yeah."
"Hmph… I'm even starting to wonder if I should prep a new piece of my own. You leave me alone every day just to draw, and I'm bored."
"It's done now. This is the final pass."
"Really? That's good news."
The reason this piece had taken so long was simple: the page count was far higher than what I usually drew. Easily past one and a half times my normal length—closer to double. That was deliberate. For this one, I'd packed the entire story through to the ending into a single volume, so the pacing and volume control had to be completely different.
The readers I'm aiming at this time aren't the ones I've been targeting before.
Getting someone to buy even one volume is hard enough. If I wanted the book to say everything I meant it to say, the whole story had to finish inside it. So I'd crammed a fairly large planned plot into one self-contained volume—designed so that a single book could hook people hard enough to make them buy. Originally the outline had been two volumes' worth of material. That was just how it was. Cutting the necessary scenes or the explicit ones to slim it down wasn't a solution I was willing to accept.
"So what's the story about?"
"A mage story. More precisely… a male witch story?"
"…A male witch? 'Witch' is just the old nickname for a female mage, isn't it?"
Historically, women had simply been more gifted at magic, so female mages had been called witches—sometimes shunned, sometimes revered. It was ancient history now, surviving mostly as legend. But the way witch tales still turned up in folk stories and fairy-tale retellings showed it was a pretty major cultural theme.
"Right. Originally only women could be witches. The protagonist's parents fall into something like an incurable illness—an eternal sleep—and he learns that only a witch of the highest caliber can cure it."
The problem was that the overall level of witches had plummeted in recent years, and no one currently alive had reached that height. The story of my new work, Witch Academy, opened with the witch who'd examined his mother explaining exactly that. In other words, the motive I'd been carefully building for a boy to cross-dress and enroll in an all-girls academy was "his parents." It's hard to casually condemn someone for doing whatever it takes to save their own mother and father.
"But that witch also tells him: none of the girls right now have the talent to become a witch of that level. Waiting won't change anything."
"…Sounds pretty hopeless."
"It is. Except she says there's exactly one method."
That method was for the male protagonist himself to become a witch. If someone with far greater magical talent than any woman learned witch magic, he could save his parents. The catch: in that world, there was absolutely no way for a man to learn magic past a certain level. So the protagonist becomes convinced that the Academy is the only place he can learn a witch's magic—and he dresses as a girl, cross-dresses completely, and enrolls. At first his talent is so overwhelming that no one suspects a thing. Later, his friends start discovering one by one that he's a boy, and the incidents unfold from there.
"That's a little like you, Cali. Outstanding magic talent, and a secret identity as Artist Siwoo on top of it."
"…Yeah. That made some of the expression a little easier, honestly."
Anyway, that was the rough outline of the new work. Naturally the ending had him actually mastering the magic and saving his parents—and after that, just as I'd first planned, he revealed to the world that he'd been a man all along, and the story closed.
"Hmm. Hearing it like this, I can't really tell."
"Well, I skipped a lot in the summary. I'll show you once the sample's ready."
"Ah, okay!"
I cleaned my plate of the breakfast Rosaria had made, gave the manuscript one last check, and left the villa. The sooner I submitted it, the sooner it would release. Even if it was rough, I just had to tough out one more day.
"It's been a while."
"Ah, it really has. For reference, even after we switched from the last exhibition to general public display, the recommendation counts have kept climbing, so the piece is still up in most regions."
"Oh, really? I figured everyone who was going to see it during the preview already had, so it would taper off."
"The copies are selling like crazy too. Oh—and some people even started buying your comics after seeing that piece."
That was a little surprising. Then again, once someone understood the emotion packed into that work, they might well want to see the happier stories that came before it.
"Looking at that enormous pile of luggage… a new work after all this time?"
"Yes. You can tell from the fact I didn't even mention a reservation—it's a completely new title."
And when I set down what was effectively two volumes' worth of comic manuscript, her expression went distinctly overwhelmed. Of course, other people had already tried something like this, so she seemed to grasp that a single book could mean a manuscript of over five hundred pages.
"Will the page count be all right?"
"We've handled up to six hundred pages without issues, so this should be fine. But this looks like cover material—how are you using it?"
One thing that changed as the book got thicker: the spine that showed when it sat on a shelf became much wider, which made it perfect for art. So for that space, I'd prepared a piece of one of the heroines from the story posed nude.
"So you're saying you'll make several different designs for this part of the outer cover? For the same work?"
"Exactly. Produce the interiors the same way, print the outer covers separately, slip them on, and sell them."
I wasn't putting merch inserts into this one—but I'd gotten so deep into the goods system that I'd come up with this bizarre format instead. At least it wasn't a gacha pull like before. People would just pick from what was on sale, so it was a little better.
"But the front-facing art is the same across them. Understood. Should we print equal numbers of each?"
"Yes, that's right."
I added that if one variant sold harder, they could just print more of that one to match demand. I wasn't trying to manufacture scarcity with limited stock. I wanted people to be able to buy as many as they wanted.
"And on the very edge of the back, there'll be a thin strip of cropped art like this."
"…Don't tell me."
"If you collect every outer cover and line them up like this, a whole new picture appears."
Since everything was easy to buy, there naturally had to be a reward you could only get by collecting them all. And that reward was a picture of the protagonist with almost all of his girls' clothes stripped off, a massive erection standing proud. It wasn't exactly the kind of art men—including me—would usually go for, but most of the people who'd collect every single cover would be the women who already read my comics anyway, so it would be fine. Better to quarantine the protagonist's art here than put it on the main cover, honestly.
"Ahh…"
Naturally, that would drive a ton of people to buy as many copies as there were cover variants just to see it—and that was exactly the situation I was aiming for with this work. The leftover interior books from those purchases would then get gifted to other people and spread outward. It was advertising perfectly matched to my current policy of targeting people who didn't normally read comics.
"There's also a black-and-white version of the front cover art. Use that as the inner cover."
"…You drew this extra as well?"
The inner cover packed every heroine into the frame in their own poses—each of them wearing a blissed-out climax expression, thick semen spilling from their cunts in the immediate aftermath of creampies, with more of it splattered across their bodies. It was an all-in explicit piece with zero restraint. The full-color front cover art was basically the same composition, just a very similar feel. Putting art on the inner cover meant I'd had to redraw a completely new piece in nearly the same layout—but considering the book would also get shared with the outer cover removed, it was necessary work. If the person receiving it was a guy, there needed to be art on the cover that got him hard the second he looked at it, or he'd never open it.
"Sorry for the wait. Here's how the sample came out."
"Looks good. It turned out well. Ah—and for the price this time, do you think about one and a half times the usual would work?"
"Yes, that sounds about right."
"Then if we run a discount sale, it could end up around the same price as the older titles, right?"
"Probably? You're planning to discount it?"
I did plan to discount it—but I intended to put a condition on it. The discount card only meant something if I got the advertising effect I actually wanted.
"If a man buys it, discount it to the same price as the others."
"…A man?"
"My master said it was a shame men don't take much interest in comics, and that she'd like to do it that way."
Of course, that wouldn't make men start reading comics. It would make women send men to buy the books for them. But my real intent was that the guy who'd been asked to buy it would see the cover, get hard, and open the book. Who the "actual" purchaser was didn't matter in the slightest.