Does Flowers Are Bait Manhwa Have An Official English Release?

I scoured the place for an official English release of Flowers Are Bait, but it looks like the book does not currently exist in an official English version as it is published in Korea. The only ‘versions’ I could find of Flowers Are Bait online were scattered, often poor quality, scanlations scattered about online of individual pages and panels of the book, which had been shared by individual readers and fans of the book online, in discussion forum posts and social media updates.

Support the creator by following the original author and the original publisher of the work on their official channels, as they will announce licensing updates on their official publisher pages as well as on their personal Twitter/Instagram accounts. Some titles are even announced to be in the works for licensing up to a year or more after they have received enough of a following in the fandom. They may also be published under a different English title name. Examples of platforms where many Korean comics are published and subsequently localized are Lezhin, Tappytoon, Webtoon, and Tapas.

No. No English edition of “Flowers Are Bait” is available from any of the typical online stores, although community translations of some of the chapters are available online. While it’s possible to support the creator of the work by reading online versions of the chapters that have been fan-translated, ideally one would want an official version with good typography and either pay the creator for it or for it to be included in one’s purchase of other work by the same publisher. Alas, the only way to directly support this particular creator and receive an English-language edition of his work at present is to politely ask publishers to translate it for release online in English under their normal business model, and to support other Korean creators whose work has already been translated for release online in English.

I haven't found out whether 'Flowers Are Bait' will be officially released in English and put up on common platforms and put in the bookshelves of normal stores, but it's one of those hidden gems that people post in translation discussion forums. The polished-up English edition by a publisher is still to be found.

Yes, this means that the improved translation, the corrected artwork and the earnings of the creator will be ensured. I bookmark those hidden gems and wait for the official release instead of reading them in a fan translation first. I really hope that a publisher will decide to release this in official translation as well and I would love to buy the clean scan of “Flowers Are Bait” then.

I wrote this while searching for ‘Flowers Are Bait’ in bookstores and on webcomic services. Since the work is a niche manhwa, I researched the licensing of similar works to see if they were also in Korean only and being read by fans through online fan translations. Based on what I found, it looks like ‘Flowers Are Bait’ is being read online by fans, but not by anyone who packages up and sells English versions of the work at stores like Bookwalker, or on services like Tappytoon, which packages up Korean comics for an English speaking audience and sells them through their catalogs.

One practical way to keep track of what your favorite work is getting translated into is to type in the original Korean publisher name and title of your favorite work and search the news for announcements by your favorite creators and their publishers. Typically, an ISBN search for a book in a language other than the original will turn up a link to the publisher’s webpage for the English language print/ebook. Note that the title of a licensed work can be changed for marketing in English-speaking countries. So searching for the title of a work you know was licensed will not always return results for English translations of that work. Setting up alerts for a creator’s social media accounts and for news from a publisher is another good way to stay up-to-date on announcements of licensed translations. Note that online translations of a work you are interested in reading are likely to be scanlations or fan translations, and these are not as desirable as official translations by licensed localizers who are able to put out the best translation of a work in order to earn a living supporting the creator of the work.