The Perfect Author Platform (for readers)
I want it ALL
Hey y’all, it’s KimBoo! I’m an author and a podcaster who is also a librarian, text technology historian, and former I.T. project manager. I write about a lot of interesting things, I hope you agree! Please consider supporting me (and my dog!) so I can keep throwing errata & etcetera into the Scriptorium!
It’s been a quest of mine for a long time: the perfect subscription platform.
I actually opened a Patreon account for my M/M penname back in 2018 or so. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing, and I also resisted using it because of the lack of features I wanted it to have. To make it work the way I wanted it to, I would have had to invest a lot of time and energy into work-arounds, but by that point my day!job was turning toxic and draining my creative well. I was too much of a perfectionist to compromise, so, predictably, the Patreon sat there doing nothing until I deleted it.
Then in early 2020, before the world locked down, I installed the RestrictContent Pro plugin on my self-hosted wordpress site. Could it do some of what I wanted it to do? Yes. Could it do everything I wanted it to do? No. The learning curve there was a bit more than I was able to handle at the time anyway, and I uninstalled it before the year was out.
Why these false starts? Because based on my experiences with writing and reading fanfiction, I figured out at least ten years ago that serialization and subscriptions were the “next big thing” for writers, but almost no one agreed with me.
All the subscription platforms were geared to artists or educators or personal coaches, and the ones that were built for readers were not meant to make the writers money (AO3 for fanfiction, Wattpad for everything else). Vella and Radish came on-scene, but they were designed to make the platforms a lot of money, not the writers. Much as with Kindle Unlimited, paying the authors was a burden the platforms were grudgingly willing to endure for the sake of content.
There were a few outliers, most famously Andy Weir (who published The Martian as a serial on his own website in 2011 since no publishers wanted it) and Anna Todd (whose “After” series on Wattpad catapulted her career around the same time) but they were considered outliers, not what they actually were: trailblazers.
In retrospect, I should have stuck with Patreon and just kicked my perfectionism to the curb. I should have just done the damn thing. Hindsight is 20/20, etcetera etcetera, and I have a long history of bailing on good ideas because of insecurity, fear, and perfectionism, after all.
But as time has kept marching on, and new platforms appeared (and disappeared), I started a rough scratch-list of all the components I want on a robust author platform. Here and there it kept growing, and growing, and growing, until it was just a long list of features in no particular order.
In the meantime, I had jumped on Ream in early 2023, sensing that it was positioned to become exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, that did not work out for me, and I’m closing my account there by the end of October, 2024. It was close to what I was looking for, but some issues came up and I realized it was not a match for my business strategy.
I’m doing well on substack with my publications, The Scriptorium and The Bibliotheca, but they lack a lot of features that would be helpful for writers and readers. It’s a newsletter platform with some social media features slapped on top, and sometimes that is very obvious.
Yes, I am aware that WorldAnvil exists. I love that platform, it is very robust and has a lot of excellent features, but it was and is designed for fantasy, RPG, LitRPG, and science fiction. I would not recommend it to, say, authors who write romcoms, or historical fiction. It is incredibly over-engineered for people who are not creating second worlds from scratch, and it also doesn’t have quite a few features that I want baked into a platform, including audio (for audio books/storycasts) or merch sales. It does what it does magnificently well, but that’s what it is designed to do.
I hear you yelling at me: Okay, KimBoo, so what do you want that you really really want?
KimBoo’s Dream WikiArchivePlatform for Authors (and readers).
If you don’t want to click the link, here is the tl;dr: Imagine a bastard child of Wikipedia, Patreon, and AO3.
If you do click that link, though, it will take you to a gDoc that is the elevated, extended version of my scratch list of features. It’s everything I want, and how I want it all to work together.
I’d prefer it if someone else built it for me, because, whew, that looks like a lot of work.
But.
I think I need to build it myself simply because I have been online since 1996, and I know that putting all your eggs in any platform’s basket is never a good idea. I had a rockin’ MySpace back in the day, and for several years, LiveJournal was almost exclusively my online habitat. Both are still around, sure, but they are not the platforms I used to love. Features change, people move on, enshittification happens.
Meanwhile, I’ve had kimbooyork.net for 20+ years. Oh sure, it’s changed a lot, and honestly needs another upgrade. It’s always held a somewhat uncertain place in the pantheon of my websites, skipping back and forth between a semi-professional site filled with resumes and portfolio examples and a personal journal for me and my friends. Now I have houseofyork.info as my “business site” and that feels a lot more secure and permanent than, say, a linktree page. Or substack, for that matter.
So my preference would be some kind of feature set I could wrap into wordpress without having to use 40 different plugins (I’m looking at you, woocommerce). Hell, I’d consider migrating to a platform like SquareSpace or Wix if they could do it all. (They can’t.)
Otherwise I’m building a whole new platform from the ground up just for myself and ACK NOOOOOOOOOOO!
The AO3 software is open source, as is MediaWiki (the software that runs Wikipedia), but they are very different from each other. Not sure how either could play with each other, if at all, much less complicated permissions set by membership tiers. I’m sure it’s possible.
I mean, anything is possible if you have enough time, money, or both.
If that’s you, please check out that google doc and let me know. *waggles eyebrows*
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I've been looking for a place to. I would be curious to hear the pros/cons of Patreon and Ream at some point, because I'm curious why they didn't work out.