Put Critical News On The Site - AKA Subscription Changes
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@GeorgeMTO Texas is 2 hours ahead of PDT, so it went live at like 11:15 PM Texas time (which is a pretty random time). Would be Oct 3rd in EDT (which seems like the date the transaction ledger uses, since I have two purchases that show 10-03 (and then hovering over shows 10/2 at like 9:09PM)
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@bfennema It went live at midnight on Central Time. You have to:
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Click on User menu.
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Click on Membership
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Click on Change Subscription button
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In the new window (similar to where you buy coins), click on Update subscription
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It will show you in the J-novel Premium Membership (it will say Current Subscription in a blue tag)
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Choosing J-Novel Premium Club Membership or J-Novel Premium Readers Club Membership will give you that tier. They also prorate your dues and you keep your original subscription renewal date.
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@bfennema said in Put Critical News On The Site - AKA Subscription Changes:
@GeorgeMTO Texas is 2 hours ahead of PST, so it went live at like 11:15 PM Texas time (which is a pretty random time). Would be Oct 3rd in EST (which seems like the date the transaction ledger uses, since I have two purchases that show 10-03 (and then hovering over shows 10/2 at like 9:09PM)
Are you from a non daylight savings region? Because Google tells me Texas is 3 hours ahead of PST right now.
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@GeorgeMTO Hah, oops. Ya, Its PDT right now (which would be 2 hours ahead) (Fixed my posts to correct the time zone)
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I saw the email a while back, and I was kinda cool with it… I mean it sucks that prices are going up sure but it seems that they tried to dial what people were after and provide a tailored offering that attempts to provide some counterbalance value…
That said; I just (less then 5 minutes ago) upgraded from premium to premium reader; because frankly I want both the backlog and the early reads…
That said my current quagmire/question, is I have yet to figure out where I find whats on offer to be read, with that new readers upgrade to my plan…
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@Nubz_Unite yeah - I am not subscribed to the newsletter.
That is why I think I did not get any information per e-mail. However, since I have been frequently visiting the forums these days I have noticed the early threads about the topic and figured together what is going on.
I personally was very surprised that I found out about it from a discussion topic fellow members talking about it.
And not from a news / announcement thread where I would have expected staff share details and link the video to the stream as well. I guess they assume putting it on the website news was sufficient - but that is the place I do not check explicitely and when you visit the website normal there is no hint about such system-changing-news.
That is probably what I am critisising most about it.
Edit: I checked again - actually I cannot find any hint to that news on the main page. Not even in the Blog section.
Sorry for my bad English - it is not my native language
Give Pens Down, Swords Up: Throw Your Studies to the Wind a try. It is that good! ♡(>ᴗ•)
I like it as much as Realist Hero ♡ -
The communication, or massive lack of it, was horrendous. A one week notice is also much shorter than any other service I use that can change subscription prices. Not to mention the annual subscription I paid for in July is no longer what I bought.
Additionally, the Reader memberships are going to be useless to me. I buy what I want to read, and I own all the series to current in the first round of Reader. I expect this to be the norm. Not that I'm surprised since I am not the targeted customer type of this subscription change.
I'll keep buying the books because that's what I do both for my pleasure reading and to support the translators and editors that make this happen. But the new membership tiers discourage me from carrying a membership at all. Looks like I'll be dropping to non-member once my neutered premium subscription ends and just sub for a month once a year to buy coins. Shame to lose the pre-pubs of any new series to see if I want to add it to my library, but this change slaps the way I've been a premium member for all these years in the face both ways.
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Well Sam, @myskaros, and all the rest of JNC staff you dropped the ball on this one.
I’ve had a week to mull over my thoughts and I think the best way to sum things up is to use the saying/meme “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.”Usually you guys are great with communication, but this time you were sloppy. There was not official post on the forum after the announcement of the changes and the website front page still (as of this writing) has the banner for September catch up. Other people have already commented on the surprisingly short time between the announcement and the implementation of the changes so I will not belabor that point.
As a customer since the pandemic, I have loved your services more than any other publisher, but that also means I (and I believe many others) hold you to a higher standard. They say if you truly love someone you point out when they make a mistake, and so as someone who really loves JNC, I hope you will learn from this error and continue to improve
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@tblomega https://j-novel.club/series?readersLibrary=available
They have updated the series menu. If you go to Readers Library and choose the Available radio button, it will show all the series that are currently in the Readers Library. It will have a new tag of the same name. The link above presets that choice. If you want to see everything again, just choose Show All.
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@GeorgeMTO Texas is 2 time-zones ahead of the west coast and 1 time-zone behind the east coast (we'uns be in central time just like Chicago). And yes, we are in the dreaded DST crap. So when it's 8:00 AM CDT in Texas, it's 9:00 AM EDT in NYC, and it's 6:00 AM PDT in LA. (hope this helps)
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@karasutengu said in Put Critical News On The Site - AKA Subscription Changes:
@GeorgeMTO Texas is 2 time-zones ahead of the west coast and 1 time-zone behind the east coast (we'uns be in central time just like Chicago). And yes, we are in the dreaded DST crap. So when it's 8:00 AM CDT in Texas, it's 9:00 AM EDT in NYC, and it's 6:00 AM PDT in LA. (hope this helps)
It doesn't. US time zones and their useless naming structure aren't relevant to the real world.
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@AnimeMayhem said in Put Critical News On The Site - AKA Subscription Changes:
A one week notice is also much shorter than any other service I use that can change subscription prices.
Your subscription price did not change. That is the big reason this is all legal.
Member became Club, a rename of the plan, but the price is the same.
Premium Members remain Premium Members, intentionally because the price is the same.
@AnimeMayhem said in Put Critical News On The Site - AKA Subscription Changes:
Not to mention the annual subscription I paid for in July is no longer what I bought.
This is annoying, but what they changed (for your premium membership) was only the coin purchase discount available. You still get your 699 free coins. Those 699 free coins are not worth a full book anymore, but you are still receiving them. I have not read it, but I am sure the T&C clearly states that it can be changed.
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Yeah just to be clear to people, if you're on the existing J-Novel Club Premium Membership plan, you will continue to remain on that plan until you choose to either cancel or move to a new membership tier. This is a legacy plan that remains exactly the same as it was previously except your coin discount perk changes from 15% to 10%. The price remains the same, and you'll continue to get your 699 coins a month.
There is a new plan J-Novel Premium Club Membership which is $1 USD more expensive that's exactly the same except that it gives 799 coins a month instead of 699 coins a month to deal with the price increase for the LN volumes.
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I'm very grateful to kuali for posting detailed info to the forum discussion on 25 Sep 2025 outlining in the upcoming subscription changes. That was the first time I was aware of the changes. (I did finally receive formal notification from JNC on the Sep Newsletter on 26 Oct). I was surprised at the short notification time given before the changes go into effect. All of my other paid online streaming services give 4 to 6 weeks advance notice of any changes (subscription or otherwise). I'm still mulling over my options at this date, but I did go ahead and buy a bunch of coins before my discount was eliminated. I would hate to drop my JNC subscription, but I'm limited on what I can do right now for a membership.
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@GeorgeMTO So I guess you're use to UTC time.
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Well having finally found somewhere on the site actually mentioning this, I'll get my long rant out of my system, even though I'm largely just going to be reiterating what several others have already said. I'll at least feel better from putting it into my own words.
On the actual price/membership changes themselves, I have nothing really to comment - it's JNC's prerogative to decide what services they wish to provide & at what cost, just as it is we users' prerogative to decide how we wish to spend our money on those services. Also, while I dislike that this change affects ongoing memberships and alters the service expected to be received by members at the time we signed up/last renewed that membership, I accept that it was likely impossible to implement the changes in a way that avoids that.
Where I am decidedly less accepting is in the manner of communication, or rather the lack of it, by which this has been conveyed to members. I have only finally made it to this post, which itself is a complaint about the lack of communication rather than a communication, via another user-created forum post in the obscure Member's Only section which I never look at, because nobody posts there, which itself I only looked up due to finding out about these changes from a Reddit post, again by someone not affiliated with JNC.
I find out in here that there was some kind of newsletter communication, which is a shame, because if I actually knew such a thing existed I'd likely be subscribed to it. But I still find that irrelevant, because if you're making a change that materially affects the substance of people's subscriptions that they have paid for, you should be communicating that directly via email to all current members at a minimum. I feel there ought to have been a news/blog post on the main site outlining the differences in each of the new membership tiers on top of this (at worst, at least link us to the Youtube video) to enable users to make an informed decision on which is appropriate for them. I also question why the only official JNC communication was via a Youtube channel that I never look at unless the news section of the forum announces an upcoming stream, yet there was no such announcement for this one. A twitter page I never look at and the discord I'm only a member of so I could report an error one time are not acceptable means of communicating such a change.
To give an example of how bad I find JNC's handling of the situation here, Disney+, around a year ago, emailed me to inform me cheerily that I'd been upgraded to their latest shiny subscription tier, starting from my next renewal date. Upon investigating what this actually meant, they had in fact discontinued my current tier and added two new ones, one which was fundamentally the same with a different name at roughly the same price, and one which was considerably more expensive and added features I didn't care about. I naturally switched straight over to the lower tier, and duly avoided paying any more than I was willing for unnecessary services. While D+ clearly tried to trick me there, I actually still prefer how they handled it to JNC, as they at least afforded me the opportunity to make the choice for myself by informing me my membership was being altered well ahead of time.
Circling this back to my initial statement, it's the user's prerogative in circumstances such as this to decide whether we wish to change subscription tier, request a refund on the time remaining for the membership we are currently subscribed to since it now provides a different service than when we signed up, or to do nothing and stay on the tier you're already on. And we've been denied the opportunity to make that decision ahead of time, due to the appalling lack of communication provided here by JNC. I'm very disappointed by this, as up until now I have considered JNC to be by far the best of the English LN companies at engaging with their customers, and better at that in general than most companies I buy services from in any industry.
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This is quite disappointing from J-Novel's side, especially since I found out about it from someone's post on the September catchup thread after wondering where the October catchups were.
Even if it isn't technically raising the price for the membership, it is a reduction in the value of them considering the loss of catchups and the reduction of the discount. Personally, I would have actually preferred a raised subscription price rather than just... cutting the things I was paying for. Especially without letting us clearly know in an announcement on the website or an email for those who aren't subscribed to the newsletter. I would have even taken a forum post in the news section. And yet as far as I can tell, even after the changes have gone into effect, none of these things have happened. There are almost certainly still people with a membership who still don't know about the changes and might not for days or weeks at this rate.
I tend to read mostly on catchups and prepubs, so I have a stockpile of coins left over from the 699 I was getting a month. While I was fine with the coins piling up without being used before, I don't have quite that much goodwill for J-Novel Club anymore. I'm planning on reducing my subscription to a Readers Club Membership until I've read everything that I want to read in the library. Then I'll probably just stick with a Club Membership to keep the prepubs.
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Is it time to post the Douglas Adams quote? All right then:
“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.’ ‘But the plans were on display . . .’ ‘On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.’ ‘That’s the display department.’ ‘With a torch.’ ‘Ah, well the lights had probably gone.’ ‘So had the stairs.’ ‘But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said Arthur, ‘yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard.”
I'm not outraged, but this really was a massive fumble. Still no email about this to me and it's already live.
By the way, the 50 titles in the Reading Library includes a lot of good stuff, though I own a lot of it already so I'm on the fence about paying for access to it.
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@Ginger_Walnut-0 Interestingly part of the reason for this membership change is because setting up the catchups was a lot of work for staff every month and their internal data showed almost no one was taking advantage of them.
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@jpwong Yeah, I can see the logic behind getting rid of catchups, but at the same time almost no one is not the same as no one. So it would have been nice for the few of us that were using catchups to get some notice of the change. Especially when the replacment for catchups is essentially a seperate upgraded subscription that costs more instead of being included with what we were already paying for.
