SubStack for Books
Substack started in 2017 as a platform that allows anyone to easily create an email newsletter. They make money by allowing writers to charge for their newsletters and taking 10% of the revenue. They were valued at $650 million after closing a Series B round in March 2021.
Archive of our own (AO3) is one of the most popular sites you may never had heard of. The site is run by a group of volunteers and is dedicated to hosting fanfiction. Fanfiction is when fans of an existing franchise write their own stories to expand the universe. It is much bigger than I thought. AO3 has been around for twelve years and has over 8 million published works, 4 million users and over 2 billion pageviews… per month. Best part is they run the entire site on $567,500 per year! Thank you volunteers!
I think a potential business opportunity would be to create a substack platform dedicated to fanfiction.
The benefit to substack is that it allows creators to easily monetize their writing and allows readers to explore similar categories and discover great content. The benefit of A03 is that it is a central location to go and create or read fanfiction. If you created a platform that allowed creators to write fanfiction by the chapter, which would then be emailed out via a newsletter then it would allow writers to go direct to their readers inbox. It would also allow writers an easy way to monetize their content if they chose to.
There is one key problem though with this idea. It would likely run into copyright issues as the writers would be charging directly for works derived from popular series that are protected by copyright.
But what if the idea was adjusted slightly? What if the site was based on original works by the chapter. Writers released their books by the chapter so they could get feedback and fans could get more frequent updates. There could be a category for a new type of book that never ends, it’s a continuous story of characters that people are into. Then the writers could charge a fee and you would have an original take on publishing.
As of the writing of this Chapterstack.com is available.