Why did I build Storyfall?

I've loved Interactive Fiction for years, ever since I played my first Choice of Games story, I got hooked. To me, interactive fiction is so much more engaging than reading a regular novel.

Around 2021 I tried my hand at writing my own interactive fiction novel with ChoiceScript. I was surprised at how clunky it felt. Even as a software engineer, the mental overhead of dealing with a scripting language just got in the way of my writer's flow.

I also wasn't in love with the revenue share model. The idea of putting hundreds or thousands of hours into writing a novel to then only get <20% of the revenue from it felt kinda harsh.

Other tools like Twine gave you control but left distribution and monetization to you, while many of the other interactive fiction websites out there looked woefully outdated, like they were built in the 90's.

Writers have an unenviable choice: either give up rights and revenue to reach more readers, or self-host and earn nothing.

With Storyfall, I wanted to build something different - a one-stop shop for writers to write, publish, distribute, and monetize their stories, and keep most of their revenue. And I wanted to make it modern, fast, and intuitive to use.

An editor that makes it FUN to write

The editor is where writers spend most of their time, so I built a graphical interface that is actually fun and easy to use. You can write scenes, branching choices, and more scenes, without ever needing to even use your mouse. As a nerd, I love keyboard shortcuts.

I also built a story tree visualizer that lets you quickly see how one scene links to another, what scenes belong to a certain chapter, and click around to jump to a particular scene.

NPCs, Factions, and Variables

Interactive fiction requires writers to make choices feel meaningful. Storyfall's editor lets you create and keep track of anything you want. For instance, you can add a variable like courage that gets incremented when a reader makes a certain choice - and then adjust the text in your scenes and choices accordingly.

You can also make choices conditional: if you never found that key in an earlier branching narrative and hasKey is still false, you can disable the choice that opens a door.

Monetization

Stories can have a single price, or be sold chapter by chapter. This can be especially handy for stories that are still being written. Got Chapter 1 ready to publish? Go ahead and set a price, then when Chapter 2 comes out, that's a separate purchase. This can help writers make money and gauge interest in their stories before they commit to spending a whole year writing something.

Or you could release Chapter 1 for free and start charging for later chapters once a reader is hooked.

Storyfall also supports paid subscription tiers. Paid subscribers can have all kinds of perks, like early access to stories or specific chapters, access to your catalog of paid stories (without having to buy each one), or access to view or post on subscriber-only forums.

As far as revenue split and rights: you keep all the rights to your stories, we just help you distribute and monetize them. You can always export your story as a JSON file and go take it anywhere else you want. It's your story.

Writer's Earnings

If you do choose to monetize, either via selling stories, chapters, subscriptions, or any combination thereof, Storyfall takes a 30% cut, and Stripe takes another 3.4% and $0.80 per sale (2.9% + $0.30 for the Stripe processing fee, and another 0.5% and $0.50 for the Stripe Tax service). That means you get to keep over 50% of your revenue for a $5 sale and over 58% on a $10 sale.

My original plan was to have writers be responsible for their own sales tax filings, chargebacks, and refunds, though the processing fees would be lower.

But it turns out that in the past few years U.S. states have passed "Marketplace Facilitator" laws which make Storyfall liable for all the sales taxes writers incur. The good news is, Storyfall will handle sales tax, chargebacks, and refunds for writers - you just get a clean check.

Otherwise, Storyfall is completely free to use for both readers and writers, and you don’t have to charge for your stories if you don’t want to - we'll host them for you for free.

Build your community with Storyfall

Writing can be hard, and it can take a long time. Most writers get paid very little or not at all, so it's really a labor of love for most people.

Communities can really help encourage us. When I know that my wife will be reading something I'm writing, I'm that much more motivated to refine it and get it to a good state (like this blog post, the first draft of which my wife said had too much “rambling”).

With Storyfall, I wanted to harness the power of communities for writers: for encouragement, feedback, and collaboration. Writers can create community forums around either themselves or specific stories to encourage discussion. You can even gate access, allowing only a specific tier of subscriber to view or post comments (whether that's free or paid).

I also added a newsletter & blogging feature, so that writers can email their subscribers and post blogs about their stories, or anything they want really.

What's next?

Storyfall is in its final testing phase right now. A few things are still getting fixed and the monetization isn't enabled yet while I double check all the payment logic works properly.

I'm a solo developer, and this is a passion project I work on in my free time. I'm lucky to be both a writer and a software engineer, so I have both the skills to build an interactive fiction platform and, at the same time, I have a pretty good idea of what a writer would want.

I wanted to build a one-stop-shop for writers to come write their stories, publish them, interact with their community of readers and fans, and, hopefully, actually make some money.

I have all kinds of future plans like sequels (letting writers branch off of other writer's stories), an iOS app, and more, but I bet you will have other ideas and feedback too, so please feel free to leave a comment here, in the "Feature Requests" forum, or you can even message me directly via the Support page.

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