Yeah they do know how to milk their hits. There are already 9 One Piece movies and another one releasing next month. To top it off the series has been running f

Yeah they do know how to milk their hits. There are already 9 One Piece movies and another one releasing next month. To top it off the series has been running for fourteen years.' To say nothing of Gundam... That said, getting a hit series is not really an easy thing for authors (mangakas). They work about 14 hours everyday and have to produce 19 pages of content every week. The gruelling workload takes a toll on a lot of mangaka's health, forcing the series into a hiatus, which further reduces their chance of becoming hits. And often even when something does become a hit, it creates its own problems: for example, from what I heard, the author of Death Note planned to end the story at what eventually became the halfway point. Instead his publishers told him that it had become so popular that they wanted him to make more of it, and so he dragged it on for a whole bunch more chapters. There's also the fact that a huge number--probably the majority--of authors don't seem to care too much about making huge hits. Just look at the sheer volume of doujin productions: nobody there ever intends to even make enough money to pay for their own time, yet there's probably more doujin manga than professionally published stuff.