Author reflections
What Simily Needs to Change
Or the platform will die
Perhaps you’ve heard of Simily.
If not, then here’s the quick version: it’s a rival site to Medium that people got excited about a few months ago (perhaps after Kristina God wrote this article), but seems to be losing momentum.
Its main features are:
- A subscription model.
- A flat 2¢ payment per read, including external (non-member) reads.
- A focus on fiction.
It’s not hard to see why Simily is potentially interesting, especially if you are a creative writer. If you are struggling to gain traction on Medium (more geared to non-fiction), it could feel like ‘home’.
In addition, the rate for external reads is a real bonus, and something that Medium doesn’t pay for. Earnings are much more transparent, too, and if you already have a large following through social media or a newsletter, you could potentially channel them to your Simily stories and watch the royalties add up.
Here’s the issue:
Two dollars as a launch price sounds okay… but you are then pretty quickly moving to seven dollars per month.
That’s a lot for a new and fairly experimental site.
The platform currently only has a few thousand subscribers. As an author, it could take a while to achieve the $7+ earnings that would be needed to break even, never mind generating an income.
While you might show that kind of patience with an established platform like Medium, it’s a bit more of a risk with Simily. Paying for an annual subscription is also a risk when you don’t know if the site will take off.
Worse: what about readers?
Are people really going to spend that much monthly on a small platform to read self-published poetry and fiction, when there is so much already out there for free on sites like Royal Road, WattPad, etc?
Other issues
There are a few other things that I have found problematic in my time on Simily so far:
- No curation, making it hard to find good reads.
- Limited editing/formatting options (for poetry, this is important).
- The groups/forums, while useful, don’t make it easy to share your stories.
- No in-built stock images (e.g. Unsplash), making it more of a hassle to upload stories.
- The site only pays out when you reach $10 earnings.
- Glitches and stability issues.
- No genre category for fantasy. Wtf???
Despite all of this, there is a lot to like about Simily. A site that really focuses on fiction is a great idea, and the ‘story of the month’ is a good initiative (though why not story of the week, and one per genre at that?).
Getting paid for external traffic is good, and should help the site to grow.
I have a poem on both sites, “Ripples”, which has made twice as much on Simily as it has on Medium.
I just think that they need to get their incentive structure right. Most ordinary readers are not going to pay $7 per month to read self-published fiction and poetry, especially when the site is still so small and stories are not well curated.
This is what I would suggest if they want to survive:
- A lower monthly rate aimed at readers only, costing just 1 or 2 dollars. That puts it more in the ballpark of ‘buy me a coffee’ and so on. It’s plausible that a reader would pay that just to support one favorite writer, and enjoy the rest for no extra cost.
- A longer intro price for writers. Most are only going to jump if the site offers a viable income stream, and it’s currently rather hard to make $7 dollars a month (I’ve only made $1.48 total!), never mind exceeding that. A few people will do it, sure, but you need broader appeal.
- They should greatly improve curation and visibility, and perhaps really hone in on poetry and micro-fiction, given that other sites already have the market for long-form fiction well covered.
- They need to get some investors to fund a more stable bespoke website.
So, what do you think? Does Simily appeal to you as an author? Would you be willing to pay $7 a month to read fiction and poetry? Let me know in the comments!
A shoutout to Andy Spears who has written several useful articles about the platform including this one: Simily for Newbies.
And to this article about gradual progress on Simily by Nour Ablaa @ Umm Soffah Nourellyssa.
And finally to Colleen Millsteed for this warning about Simily’s bugs and stability issues.
Here is my own Simily profile: