Twigg fixes digital publishing.
We are reimagining publishing from the ground up to make Twigg the best possible experience, whether you are a readers or an author.
Current publishing options suck.
Problems for Readers:
- None of the current options provide a truly modern digital experience (even story apps feel like the internet of 10 years ago, not 2024). No one likes clunky or ad-bloated.
- None of the digital options allow you to truly own your purchases — your investment in their library could disappear if the app takes down content or goes out of business.
- It can be hard to discover good content when wading amidst a sea of endless cookie-cutter crap written for an algorithm rather than from creative inspiration.
Problems for Authors:
- Authors basically have 3 high-level routes:
- Sell your rights to a publisher, lose all creative control, and get pennies on the dollar.
- Self-publish on story apps like Wattpad or Raddish. These often come with bland, ad-bloated UIs awash with cringe content, still often control your pricing and pay you very little per sale, and end up limiting your readership to users of that app (these digital stories typically are not SEO discoverable or able to be sold on your own website).
- Self-publish on Amazon. In order to make a decent royalty % you have to give exclusive rights to Amazon and price it within a certain range Amazon sets. And of course, it’s Amazon. Not everyone loves selling their soul to monopolies.
- With any these options, you never get any reader contact data, as it’s all about the platform growing their power and trying to lock users into their system and rules. If you want to build any real brand you NEED to be able to have a direct relationship with your fans, at a minimum capturing email addresses. Otherwise, you don’t really have an audience or a business at all.
- None of these options provide any meaningful customization of the UI (colors, fonts, layout) so it’s impossible to make the experience of your story feel like your own brand or story world.
- None of these options allow you to set your own business model (pay per chapter, pay per book, monthly subscribers, serial content, free content, unlocking via ownership of other digital content, etc.); they are each a cookie-cutter model. You could piece together different tools like Patreon, Medium, Amazon, etc. for different parts of your business, but then you are sending your readers all over the place and diluting your brand and engagement. There’s no one place to rule them all.
The Root Problem
At the end of the day you feel like you are being treated as part of an assembly line, a cog in someone else’s wheel, rather than connecting with unique story worlds and their creators (if a reader) or creating your own ecosystem and business (if an author).
You realize the current systems are all about serving advertisers rather than creators, and writing for an algorithm rather than writing the story that needs to be written. Pumping out content for an algorithm becomes antithetical to true inspiration and creativity, but everyone feels shackled.
The only way for an author to truly own their own work, publish on their own terms, and customize the user experience to fit their brand and story world would be to create their own web app, mobile app, and/or publishing house from scratch. We see brands like Brandon Sanderson or Harry Potter do that, but that requires resources far beyond what the average author has available.
Only once you understand all of this — which may happen after spending countless hours scouring forums, realizing no one is happy with the current options but they just tell you to “settle” for what everyone else is putting up with — then you’ll understand why Twigg exists.
Twigg solves all these problems.
Twigg gives readers a phenomenal experience, with a seamless modern UI:
- Immersive and customized to the story world you are in.
- Gamified with rewards based on your activity.
- True digital ownership, with ability for limited collector editions and resale of “used” copies, as well as rights management for derivative works.
- No ads, ever.
- This all while keeping the entire UI completely user-friendly and in fact easier than most competitors’ sign up processes (your grandma could do it).
And Twigg is the dream solution for authors, giving you everything you ever wanted in one place to publish on your own terms:
- Full control of UI (IF desired, can customize backgrounds, manuscript fonts, UI fonts and colors, even ambient music or rich media, as well as story landing page design and URL).
- Native AI tools to help with creating these sort of assets to amplify and enrich the story experience (eventually fully-automated creation based just on the manuscript, along with an in-house team to proof).
- Full control of business model (mix and match pay per book, pay per chapter, timed unlocks, subscription-gated, free, or even QR-code or digital asset-unlocked content).
- Stories are easy to share anywhere on the internet with a public story landing page (no app install or login needed) — even embed in your own site. Good stories spread by word of mouth. So rather than putting up barriers, everything on Twigg is optimized for virality.
- Retain all rights to works, set your own pricing, keep up to 80% yourself.
Authors will be able to create “badges” to gamify their readers journey — e.g. recognizing those who finish reading certain stories, refer friends to them, leave reviews, etc. and potentially rewarding with exclusive bonus content.
Other gamification elements will be possible, such as SMS integration for in-character-voice notifications of new content, and an xp system with levels and ability to earn the tokenized voting power.
Best of all, there’s no black box algorithm to serve. No censorship. With our partner TwigX (https://www.twigx.xyz/), readers will directly vote for the creators they want to support with a tokenized, limited-upvote “pledging” system, so that discoverability is based on true user conviction rather than bots. This results in a provably unbiased and transparent system that rewards quality content with visibility on a level playing field.
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Perhaps it’s lot to take in.
If so, that’s only because there are so many problems with existing options. Something that fixes them all is desperately needed.
Once using Twigg, it will all be so effortless, intuitive, and effective that everyone will wonder why they ever used anything else.
