Making Manga? Send It To VIZ

@FoxxFireArt: Did we read the same release? The form *I* was looking at said that VIZ has no obligation to pay you for only the submission, and that if they want to publish it they have to sign an additional agreement with you. The signed release for the submission has no bearing whatsoever on what profits they might get to keep versus what you would get, since that would be addressed in this second agreement.
 
I am aware, however, that there's a piece in there stating that essentially VIZ does not owe you for anything that they produce separately that bears a "striking similarity" to your work, whether it was created before or after your submission. However, I suspect it's standard lawyer fare, and I don't think a company like VIZ is going to open itself up to lawsuits and negative PR by stealing creators' ideas after they submit-- trust me, VIZ is obsessive about these things. In fact, Simon from Icarus Publishing-- a man who prints manga in the US himself, and who surely knows considerably more than I do about the business -- holds out hope that VIZ's creator contracts will be like Shogakukan and Shueisha's, in which the creator retains the copyright to his or her works.
 
As for Del Rey, having spoken to a few Del Rey creators-- the company puts out great books, but as I understand it the amount of promotion that they are able to give them is not immense relative to licensed works, and the creators really have to put forth a lot of their own effort. Which is not intended to suggest in the slightest that anyone shouldn't work with Del Rey or that this is even different from VIZ (too early to say); only that things are not streets paved in gold and lined in lollipops at Del Rey, either. ;)
 
That said: I've already sent an e-mail out to my contacts at VIZ to see what they can tell me about the program, including a question about contracts and whatnot. I'll withhold further judgment until I see what they say. :)

@FoxxFireArt: A huge part of the difference you're noticing is simply a difference in tactics. Del Rey's tagline is "The Otaku's Choice," and the titles they license, from Moyashimon to Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei to Genshiken and more are decidedly aimed at the core manga audience. Their outreach efforts to reach mainstream readers outside of that core are primarily original works, mostly based on Del Rey novel titles (a la In Odd We Trust and the like).
 
VIZ, by contrast...they publish a LOT of manga, and they aim at a lot of different groups. But some of their titles, the marketing decisions are based entirely on reaching outside the core manga audience-- and there are a lot of casual fans of Naruto, Bleach, and other TV-accessible shows who have no interest in Japanese culture whatsoever. You can also see a lot of this in VIZ's choices of anime: they tend to only bother releasing titles that have big, broad appeal, or else have a very distinct appeal to current anime fans. Naruto, Bleach, and potentially Monster fit in the first category; Honey and Clover and Nana would fit in the latter. I've always wondered if this is why FUNimation gets some of the Shogakukan/Shueisha-related anime titles like D.Gray-Man or Ouran High School Host Club-- neither of which are obvious mainstream hits.
 
Which is not to say you shouldn't dislike VIZ's tactics and decisions, of course; but in the end every company's decisions are based on how they perceive their bottom line, and for many VIZ titles I suspect that the bottom line is getting more non-manga readers, rather than pleasing the established ones.

@FoxxFireArt: Ah, but "Detective Boys" might have made girls feel unwelcomed into the series!
 
Not saying that's necessarily their reason, or that it's enough of a reason (which is of course subjective), but I'm pretty confident that no one at VIZ is changing anything around just for grins, either.