A home for stories, read and written
Writers Hub: Read It, Write It, Publish It
One account for both halves. Read what other people have written, then publish your own — a short story, a serial, a screenplay, a play, a poem — and keep the readers who liked the last one.
Where you got to
Chapter 9 of 14, kept for you on every device.
Reading now
Chapter 9 — The Salvage
A warm sepia page, type at the size you set, and no advertising anywhere near the words. Save it first and it reads the same with the signal gone.
- Formats
- 7
- Chapters
- 14
- Platform
- In your browser today, with iPhone and Android apps to follow
- Audience
- People who read fiction, and people who write it — usually the same people
- Scope
- Reading, writing, publishing, serials, and the readers who follow them
- Positioning
- A reading app you can also write in, rather than two apps that ignore each other
What it does
Both halves of the same habit
People who write fiction read a great deal of it, and the tools usually make them keep two accounts in two places. This is one place, and the writing side knows what the reading side is for.
Seven shapes a story can take
Short story, novella, novel, TV pilot, screenplay, stage play, poetry. A screenplay gets sluglines, action and dialogue; a stage play gets character cues and stage directions. The editor knows which one you are writing.
Serials, a chapter at a time
Write a long story and release it in parts. Set a chapter to appear on Friday and it appears on Friday, and the people following you are told the moment it does — not when you scheduled it.
A reading page built for long sittings
Three grounds including a warm sepia, type size and line spacing you set once, and your place kept for you. Save a story first and it reads exactly the same with no signal at all.
You decide what reaches you
Filter by format, genre, audience and language, and set the strongest content you are willing to be shown. That setting is obeyed everywhere stories are listed, not just on the page where you set it.
An assistant that suggests, never decides
Ask it to carry a passage on, tighten your prose, fix the mechanics without touching your deliberate fragments, or read back over earlier chapters for contradictions. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you ask, and nothing is published without you.
Who actually finished it
Writers see how many people read to the end, not merely how many opened it — which is the number that tells you whether the middle is working.
A story, start to finish
From the first sentence to the readers who wait for the next one
The order below is the one writers actually work in, which is why publishing is in the middle rather than at the end — most of the work happens after the first chapter is out.
- Read for a while, and follow the writers worth following.
- Start something. Drafts save as you type, and keep saving if the connection drops.
- Pick the shape — a short story, a script, a play — and write in the form that suits it.
- Publish, choosing who can see it: everyone, confirmed accounts, or just your followers.
- Turn it into a serial, and schedule the chapters that follow.
- Watch who read to the end, and write the next one knowing.
Your work and your privacy
What you write stays yours
You keep every right you have in what you write. Publishing here gives us permission to store it, back it up and show it to the people you chose to show it to — and nothing else. We do not license it on, we do not sell it, and we do not train anything on it.
There is no advertising in the app and no third-party tracking in it. The one thing that leaves our systems is text you deliberately hand to the writing assistant, and the privacy policy says exactly where that goes and who receives it.
Both documents are published with the app itself, so what you read there is always the current one.
Under the bonnetHow it is built. Only interesting if you work in software — nothing here changes what the product does for you.
Built once, for every screen it will run on
Kept deliberately short — none of this changes what the app does for you.
- One codebase, not three
- The website and the iPhone and Android builds all come from a single codebase, so they stay one product instead of three that drift apart.
- Works with the signal gone
- Saved stories, and anything you write or post while offline, wait on the device and go out when you are back.
- Nothing watching you
- No advertising, no third-party analytics, and even the typefaces are inside the app rather than fetched while you read.
Somewhere to put the first sentence
We build products people spend real time inside — where the reading is comfortable enough to keep going and the writing tools stay out of the way.