On Blogging | Author Skills
Update — What did Simily Change?
And is the Medium competitor just a scam at this point?
A few months back, in June 2022, I wrote my view on what the writing platform Simily.co needs to change:
Problems and suggestions
To sum up, here are the main things I highlighted or suggested in that article. All things that they should change or add:
- More editing/formatting options to support poetry.
- Built-in stock images (e.g. Unsplash).
- Paying out at all levels, not just when you reach $10.
- Fix glitches and stability issues.
- Add a genre category for fantasy (!)
- Improve curation and visibility, especially for poetry and micro-fiction.
- A cheaper monthly rate aimed at readers only.
- A longer intro price for writers.
- A more stable bespoke website.
In short, there were some major issues that stood in the way of the platform taking off. As I suggested at the time, without addressing these things, Simily was likely to die.
So how are they doing?
Well, here is how things stand, almost half a year on:
- Fantasy does at least appear as a category in the drop-down menu on the home page. Yay! But it is weirdly absent elsewhere. Take this image, further down the front page of the site:
You can see sci-fi, poetry, horror… but no fantasy (I mean, for me fantasy is a happy read, but perhaps that’s not the same thing! 😅)
Why this neglect? It strikes me that fantasy is one of the biggest genres, perhaps the biggest outside of romance. Ever heard of Lord of the Rings, anyone? Game of Thrones? Harry Potter?! It’s a strange omission.
Elsewhere:
- No change to membership/cost. This is the biggest barrier.
- No changes to… well, really anything else that I can see!
This lack of progress is disappointing. Now, granted, they have done a few things along the way, like having a featured ‘story of the month’. They did a Black Friday deal for the annual fee, too.
As Andy Spears reported, they eventually nudged up to 10k members.
But I think that the fundamentals are still wrong. And that’s why people are leaving. Look at this selection of the most recent stories about the platform here that I found here on Medium:
I think this says a lot, especially as these are people who are active and at times advocates for the platform.
I think that the point in Abena Talks’s article is especially worrying:
“I should have earned more than $200 this month from the platform, but my earnings are stuck at $8. I know for a fact that I should have earned way more because I have confirmed views from my cohort students and friends and family.”
Wow!
As for me, my Simily earnings have been stuck at around $4.50 for months, and then recently went down to $3. Wtf?! They should have at least stayed the same.
And even searching on Simily itself, I find pretty much the same story:
All in all, Simily is a writing site that had both potential and problems. They have done nothing to fix the problems. And perhaps now, for those writers who buy a membership in the belief that they will earn their money back, it amounts to little more than a scam.
Psst… before you go, you can find more of my articles about blogging here, as well as guidance on creative writing right here. I also write fiction on Medium — check out some examples in this list!