We’re a small group of writers with some experience of setting up websites. Our aim is to set up an online space where writers can share work and get feedback, the same way writing groups and courses primarily help writers by getting the thoughts of others and changing what they’ve done (or not, in some cases). We also wanted to give a space where writers could sell ebooks without the cut taken by a lot of online publishers. Our theory is that, because of the advances of AI and the relative ease of setting up websites, we can let writers sell books online directly and get more of the revenue themselves, especially if they’re selling to a community that’s already built up by offering samples of writing and getting feedback. Basically, we’re not business savvy enough to make a profit. There are still some costs to setting up and running a website, especially if usage increases, so we can’t do everything for free, but we think we can cover costs (and our time) for less than what the current big online publishers take as a cut from writers.
We charge £5 to publish each sample, to help cover costs and to discourage people publishing swathes of work it’s taken an LLM a second to produce following a prompt. There’s no charge with samples beyond that. Free to read, free feedback, free to discuss online. For full ebooks, there is a per sale percentage – % we take – but it’s much lower than other online publishers. Amazon, as an example takes % per sale. The main reason we take this is to cover bandwidth costs. It doesn’t cost much to download a single ebook, but we do have to cover the cost of bandwidth if users are uploading and downloading a high number of documents. There has to be some money coming in to cover the money going out.
Otherwise, that’s it. We want to keep everything simple and let others get on with it.