Hey folks,

Big news. We've worked hard the past couple of months to deliver one of the biggest features we've been planning for a long time.

We now support publishing stories chapter by chapter!

This is the beginning of a new phase. Works published on Quibble have remained static as updating them required a lot of manual work, and we were relying almost exclusively on EPUBs.

With this release, authors can now publish new chapters for their stories and edit previously published ones. Yay!

This works for all types of content, be it regular novels, or web series.

What it means for published authors

Authors can now access their published work within their dashboard and rework past chapters, or release new ones. Much like submissions, this goes through a review process with our editorial team, but review time should be typically pretty fast compared to brand new submissions.

You can find a tutorial video that will help you navigate this feature at the end of this post

What we'll release soon

This is a large feature that took quite some fine-tuning to implement. It's in early version, and not everything is yet supported.

Here's what we're going to release within a few days to a couple of weeks:

👉 A reworked submission process

Our current submission process still relies on EPUBs. It's also too complex. We're going to release a new version at the beginning of next week.

This new version will let authors choose how they want to provide the content:

• as an EPUB
• or as individual chapters (by uploading files, or copy/pasting the content)

All in all, this should make it very easy to cross-post from or bring from work from other platforms.

👉 Edit the cover art and the metadata

Currently, authors can only rework their chapters. We're going to give more flexibility so more can be updated! The cover art, the metadata, the synopsis, the genres, and more.

👉 Email notifications

We'll let you know by email when your chapter is ready to be published, or if there's a revision needed. For now, it's still all happens within the web app. This will land in the coming days!

👉 Scheduling releases

You'll be able to either automatically publish once the review is accepted, or schedule a release at your convenience (with a provision of a few days to ensure our editors have time to review your work)

👉 Better discoverability

Newly updated work will appear more prominently on the home page. We know there's a lot of discussion around the "algorithmic" of other platforms. Remaining fair is not a trivial task, so we'll take the necessary time to do it well. This feature will deserve it's own post when it'll be ready to be released :)

👉 Some more ^^

We're listening to your feedback. If there's something we should add, fix, remove, rework, we'll also of course consider this as well. It's a new feature, after all!

--

That's it, we're so so so excited about this, this alone will literally transform Quibble into a much more dynamic space.

Authors can fully choose how they want to release their work, by chapter, by arc, or however they want. They can also improve their stories over time and as they see fit.

Demo video

You can check how it works in this little video we prepared for you.

Authors can now access their "My earnings" dashboard with per-book metrics and revenue! 🎉

It's been in the making for a while and it's finally here, at least in a first version. This dashboard allows authors to see the following for each month:

• How many words have been read for each of their books
  • More in depth analytics like completion rates, churn, demographics and more is planned for later this year in a different dashboard :).
• The publishing rate

We're going to follow up with the actual onboarding with our payment provider as soon as we've finalized everything with them. Until then, earnings will simply accrue in the dashboard.

Back in September last year, we've introduced our subscription plan Quibble+ as an optional support plan. We are thrilled that quite a few people adopted it. To those who did: you're literal champions! We've decided to redistribute all the subscription revenue generated from it to authors based on how much their work was read up until March. Quibble took 0 revenue from it.

Quibble+ is since March required to read on Quibble (with a 1 month free trial :^) ). Many authors have expressed a wish to publish one or more stories for free, either to help build their readership, or simply to make their content freely available. Consequently, we're currently working on a second publishing label where authors will be able to publish their stories for free, outside of the monetization program. This is planned for the coming weeks!

What's next?

• Support for publishing serials (or chapter by chapter for novels), editing previously published chapters, and scheduling releases.
• A drastically simplified submissions process
• ... and many more things we'll reveal soon ;-).

Quibble is about to close to loop and be fully equipped to host many different types of stories, pay authors, and provide a great reading experience.

Let's go!

(Edit: typos :p)

The Monster of Savidor by Joy Wolfe
𝒬 Genre(s): High-Stakes, Mythic, Mysterious

Whispers of the Silent Age by Reinventor
𝒬 Genre(s): Adventure, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-fi

Whispers of the Silent Age by Reinventor
𝒬 Genre(s): Adventure, Fantasy, Romance, Sci-fi

Another Golden Boy by Damien Brandt
𝒬 Genre(s): Historical, Romance, Fantasy, Horror

Hatred: A Horror Anthology by D.G. Obra
𝒬 Genre(s): Horror, Serialized Fiction, Mystery Thriller, Historical

They WILL Betray You by T.D. Elliott & Zara Baker
𝒬 Genre(s): Fantasy, Young Adult, Adventure, Literary

Stargazers by Gregory Swan
𝒬 Genre(s): Sci-Fi, Fantasy

Shaped By Silence by Tom Wouters
𝒬 Genre(s): Fantasy, Psychological Thriller

Sorarias Academia by Tylor Silver
𝒬 Genre(s): Urban Fantasy, Magical Girl

Aurelian Stars by Eren Nequist
𝒬 Genre(s): Fantasy, Horror, Thriller

Weighted Fates by Phospherus Ames
𝒬 Genre(s): High Fantasy, Romance, Queer fiction

To Defeat Heroes by Jessica Landers
𝒬 Genre(s): Isekai, Dark Fantasy

Blinding Light by Ryan James Scott
𝒬 Genre(s): Fantasy

Coreline by Justnox
𝒬 Genre(s): Cyberpunk, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Slice of Life, Drama

Protocol: Polar Night by Tom Wouters
𝒬 Genre(s): Sci-Fi

The Viridian Sphere by J. H. Seward
𝒬 Genre(s): Fantasy, Adventure

Stagehand by Damien Brandt
𝒬 Genre(s): Queer Romance, Coming-of-Age, Slice-of-life, Quiet Rebellion

Edax Sapiens by Kadon L. Peterson
𝒬 Genre(s): Sci-Fi, Romance, Horror, Coming-of-Age

For Those Who Mourn by Leena Lukman
𝒬 Genre(s): Psychological Horror, Young Adult

FUSHI NO SHOKUZAI by CLARK
𝒬 Genre(s): Dark Historical Fantasy

Chasing Nova by Bearinison
𝒬 Genre(s): Romance

Rocks for Brains by BB Miller
𝒬 Genre(s): Fantasy, Romance, Adventure

Harvest Protocol by Virgil Coleman
𝒬 Genre(s): Dystopian

+ 200-300 copyright free titles, that are free to read!

Hi everyone,

Today we're publishing our Monetization Program Terms and with them, we're also updating our Publishing Terms and Terms of Service. This post covers all of it, and some more!

But first:

On protecting author's works

Our commitment to protecting author's work is absolute. Since Quibble's inception, we've made it a non-negotiable that all works being submitted to Quibble are stored securely and protected from any misuse. While we've spoken at length about our commitment in this regard, we've decided to take it a step further.

The new Publishing Terms now include an unconditional, contractual commitment that Quibble will never use your work (any of it, published or unpublished, free or paywalled) to train, fine-tune, test, or develop any AI or machine learning model.

This clause is here as a promise that, no matter what happens to Quibble, and no matter where Quibble goes, it always holds true. This is here for authors to enforce. There's a lot of "trust me bro" in today's world, and many have been deceived by this. We say "no more", and we wish the industry will follow our steps in this direction.

Here's what else was updated:

Publishing Terms

These terms have been substantially expanded and rewritten. The essence is the same as the previous ones, but they now offer much more protection to Quibble authors. Core rights (ownership, withdrawal rights, no exclusivity) are the same.

We've made it more explicit that our license does not cover derivative works such as audiobooks, film, theatrical, and other adaptation without a separate written agreement.

The guaranteed removal procedure for Quibble Collections works is now more detailed, and some sections, including the moral rights section, now clearly reference the Swiss Code of Obligations. As you may (or may not) know, Swiss Law is among the most protective laws for authors in the world, particularly for moral rights.

A few new sections cover long-term continuity of your account and what happens in the very unlikely event that Quibble shuts down permanently. I won't cover these here.

Overall, we're very happy about the new terms, and we hope you'll be as well.

You can read them here.

Terms of Service

We've also updated the Miscellaneous section to harmonize it with our other legal documents. This rewrites some of the language around governing law, assignment clause, waiver, force majeur, severability and the entire-agreement statement.

Monetization Program

Now this, THIS, is something we're also extremely excited to announce. If you've been following Quibble for a while, you know we've been discussing these for long with a recurring "it's coming" tag line. Well, it's here, finally ^^.

I'm thrilled to announce that our Monetization Program is going live!

Authors will be able to onboard onto the program, provided they have published at least a work under the Quibble Collections label (previously Quibble Original / Featured, those are now retired labels), with at least 5 chapters of 1'000+ words.

Here's how earnings work:

• We track how many 100 words a subscriber reads from your work (securely, speed reading and other cheating-like behaviors don't count).
• Each month, we publish a payout rate in $ per 100 words (practically, in Swiss Francs for now).
• Monthly earnings translate to how many words subscribers read from your combined works, times the payout rate.
• Payouts go out the following month, or are carried over until your balance hits ~$10

Payout rates are determined based on Quibble's overall revenue. We commit to dedicate the majority of our revenue to authors, and therefore towards the payout rate. It's important to note that monthly published payout rates will fluctuate a lot in the early months as it depends on many factors (number of subscribers, number of published works, numbers of words read, ...). Therefore, they'll initially be abnormally high, and will converge over time. So is the nature of a young publishing space :-).

Also worth noting, while we cannot disclose how exactly Payout Rates are determined, once we hit 500 authors in the Monetization Program, we commit to commissioning an independent third-party audit (more technically, an Agreed-Upon Procedure) of our methodology, so as to provide as much transparency about our commitment.

You can read more about the program directly in the Monetization Program Terms.

A final note on timeline: today we publish the terms, next week we'll give authors access to the earnings dashboard, and shortly after we'll onboard authors with our payment providers (as we're still sorting a few details out).

That's all folks!

Thank you for your continued support and thank you for believing in Quibble and in a bright future for human creativity.

(Edit: added the missing links to the terms)