Thank you man, that was very well written and answered a lot of my questions.
I like you.
This is a great explanation. Thank you for giving us a deeper insights regarding to this matter :)
You seem to be educated. The heck you doin' on mangago?
Reading comics. Haha.
Oh. Same (⌒▽⌒)
So now,this sadness is going to last forever?
Firstly, sorry for a long post with bad english.
In my opinion, what Koogi(author of KS) has done isn't totally meaningless. What they're doing now is to get enough people signed for a petition due in 25 days. The petition aims to put Lezhin under tax investigation for foreign revenue. Around 40k people signed, and need around 350k more people for it to be taken into consideration. The union law is quite weak in Korea, and as far as I know there isn't a group like union for manwha authors that has legal power(and even if there is, it won't be of much help because of weak union laws anyways). That's why they're asking people to sign for them. Most of the authors if not all haven't got paid for the last two years from overseas revenue while Lezhin consistently earned money from coin sales on english site and from selling it to foreign providers. At that time Lezhin said to authors that overseas providers don't pay them, which an author found out was a lie(he directly contacted the provider). Then Lezhin is currently refusing to publicly disclose their accounts, insisting they don't have revenue information on their accounts(as in, they didn't record the amount of sale). Some authors tried to contact them and all managers related didn't pick up on purpose. There are several more problems but this one is what's being discussed, so I'll cut it here. I think there's no harm trying helping them.
Thanks for the heads up
I just got back to mangago after a week hiatus because of exam, so I don't know there's issue like this. that’s why, I thanked you for your explanation about this matter
umm all US creators have been paid (a lot of money at that). the problem is with Lezhins Chinese branch, it has nothing to do with the US service. where did you see that "most of the authors if not all haven't got paid for the last two years"? there is a post on Lezhin's blog about this incident
thank you for this post. but the problem doesn't have anything to do with the US service, but the Chinese service, which Lezhin ran thru local agencies (lezhin doesn't have a direct chinese platform). problems happened when the agencies didn't pay a few Lezhin artists on time. so the real problem wasn't Lezhin, but the chinese agencies. tho Lezhin should checked the pay process more carefully. but basically, i dont know why US creators are complaining.. they got all the support from Lezhin and have been paid (they make a lotttt of money).
There's issues authors have regarding their contacts that OP didn't mention.
http://porifra.tumblr.com/post/168424485685/rough-summary-on-events-leading-to-lezhin-tax
They've been paid but they're not happy with their current contacts. US creators receive a small percentage of US sales, lezhin takes the most of it.
lezhin doesn't take most of it. creators are paid a monthly fee of almost $2000 and also get good percent of each coin for more profits too. bestselling creators make millions of dollars.
and don't read unofficial things on tumblr. check out the lezhin blog for official statement.
All statements from lezhin are in Korean, which is why we're relying on "unofficial" sources for information. Unlike this post, the one on Tumblr has linked the sources. Would you care to share an "official" source stating that best selling creators make millions of dollars?
And lezhin takes 80-90% of us sales, that is most of it. If you read the link you'd see that. (it has multiple sources, one of which was an interview with a lesson representative)
Lezhin representative*
it is VERY biased. Lezhin US realized an official statement with all the facts on their blog. the one on tumblr is a rough and biased translation of what's been happening. therefore, unofficial. read the official statement to understand everything. don't rely on some tumblr post a biased fan translated
also, if lezhin took $1000 in late fee, that means creator made $10,000 that month. even if lezhin takes "most" of profits, it's for marketing, editing, translating, events, so much more. if creators want 100% profit, they should just selfpublish or something. Any creator, writer shares profits with company because the company gets more readership and viewership for them.
As someone who is witnessing this issue from Korea, I say that, before everyone start hating lezhin completely, please, at lease try to see where they are coming from. Lezhin has been a very good company. What they are bragging about it their FAQs about their competent pay, the opportunities when you work with them, are all true. Problems only started to arise when they established the international site which is the US lezhin. The problem is, South Korea has very different rules as compared to the international laws so they have to do a lot of adjustments. Let's take a look at what happened just this year of 2017.
1. The web novel service was closed. (I wouldn't blame the company for this entirely. THEY are a company. And business is indeed BUSINESS. They aren't charity, so when they saw that the web novels are not profiting and instead, are making them loose money, they stopped it. They went through proper protocol. They gave 30 DAYS notice to all the writers. The problem with this is, they didn't properly pay off the writers with their separation fees and breach of contract fees. Everyone received their pays very late, as opposed to what Lezhin has promised them, and some didn't even received their payments.)
2. Issues with international cut offs from English sales. (A lot of authors are complaining about how they didn't receive their international revenues for months now. Lezhin has already responded to the issue about problems with syncing their financial accounts because of international laws. You see, the authors aren't the only ones losing here, because Lezhin also has to pay a lot of fines due to this issue. What I hated about this, is how the creators took to twitter, instead of organizing a union and directly confronting lezhin authorities. And on Lezhin's side, they didn't even made an effort to talk to the authors, too.)
3. The recent call of authors for even international fans to sign up a petition on tax investigation regarding lezhin accounts. (You see, I mentioned above about the problems with the accounts and financial laws both domestic and international. Lezhin already has a problem about this one since US Lezhin is established. If the artists keep kicking Lezhin while the company is already at its knees, they would also be hurting themselves in the process. And also, I don't know if you have signed up for the petition, but I hope you won't. I hope you make an effort to understand what was written in there first. I don't understand why they do this when a lot of international fans can't even read and understand Korean. Koogi's tweet of calling international fans to sign up and simply copy paste that you agree, is by our law, will not even be counted in the vote ins. This is kind of hypocritical of them also, because back then, they were so aggressive to international fans because of illegal uploads, to the point of them resorting to name calling and making fun of how "international fans" are so thirsty and desperate just because fans don't understand their tweets. I'm serious. Try scrolling back through most of the popular BL webtoon artists and look through the replies. You'll see what I'm talking about.
4. Overall, you would see that majority could be blamed on Lezhin, but it is not because they wanted these to happen, neither it is because they don't care about their artists, like what a lot of people are thinking. Lezhin has 5000+ series and counting. (Korean and English site combined). Provided that there are manga and non-Lezhin exclusive artists included in there, their artists must be numbering around 500~ or even more. It's not easy to cater to everyone equally. Their editing department is even less numbered. That's why a lot of changes happened, like how they established a rule about submitting a completed chapter 2 days before the upload date. This has taken a toll to creators who have a weekly deadline because that just gives them 5days to create. The point with this is, lezhin wanted to make sure that they will be uploading quality chapters. You must've noticed how a lot of creators are retweeting before how they made a mistake so fans should go back to read the chapter again an hour or two after the upload schedule of their chapters. A lot of korean fans have complained about this practice, for a lot of reasons. That's why Lezhin made that move. They didn't do this simply to torture the artists. They did this so they can catch mistakes if there are any. I think they should've consulted and made an arrangement with the authors first regarding this issue, so that every one could've voiced their opinions and planned for necessary adjustments.
What I'm trying to say is, there are always two sides to an issue. And you, as a reader, as a fan, should always be aware of them. This is the age of the internet, so we should make effort to double up our skills in analyzing and awareness. Don't just jump on something that someone said just because you liked their works, and you are so bent on supporting them. The only way to properly support them is to buy their works legally, even if you are reading from a site like this. (Because let's face it, I am also reading from this site.) My references for these are from twitter mostly in the reply sections of main tweets that a lot of fans dont often see. (So please, make an effort. I don't care if you google translate the tweets, just so you will have an idea about the entire picture, not just a very small part of it.)
To people are are syaing "why now?", the removal of Lezhin series from here are only to be expected. They have been filing for the copyrights months ago. Due process only dictates that they have to go through proper processes in accordance to law that's why it took them months to get here now. So yeah. Everyone, enjoy it while it last. Stop giving shit to lezhin, stop giving shit to creators, basically stop giving shit to our fellow readers, because seriously, the fact that we're here reading doesn't give us the right to complain about anything, unless we all go to the official site to buy and then send our complains through the Lezhin feedback system.
Thank you for reading up until here.