How Spark of Tales Works

Spark of Tales is a writing and reading platform designed to help writers in their endeavors by bringing the spark of inspiration upon them, and readers by engaging them with the story from the get go. Together they form a community around a book in writing and play in a game of promotion, helping to bridge the gap between writing and promoting, while keeping everything free from publishers and corporate greed, trusting that the best stories will market themselves.

The writing panel

To seamlessly achieve this, while preventing slop and AI generated content, a gamified event writing panel was developed. This is where the prose of each chapter is written in small doses defined by the events. Events serve as both limitations of copy pasting content and as descriptive story regions confined in a single environment. You may only submit your event if you have any inspiration remaining. The inspiration gauge is visible below a flame icon which dims as you write, indicating that your inspiration must be filled soon.

How do you fill the inspiration?

Inspiration is primarily filled through the manifest tab by adding story elements. These can be environments, sub environments, characters and items. Each story element has its own name, description, tags, aliases, a place where it belongs, in case of characters even holding slots for items, location, a mark to be potentially abducted into another story, the ability to merge with other elements, its level, reference count, the ability to be linked with another story element, and ultimately to be destroyed from the story, causing you to gain inspiration from an ultimate act of sacrifice.

These are not the only ways one can regain inspiration. Inspiration is also gained by completing quests that will randomly appear as you submit your events, or through special cards that you collect as you submit whole chapters, and through interaction with your audience.

Readers level up as well

Readers may ask questions which writers might pin and answer later, gaining reputation both ways. A good reader will quickly level up, unlocking new perks such as: suggesting short story events for the books they read to help inspire the writers further; voting on completed quests and rating them, which helps promote the most reliable writers to the public; creating their own wandering character and watching them visit random books, discovering those books in the process while overseeing how the character was assimilated into the story by the writer; creating quests of their own which will wander into someone's story eventually; writing an actual event for a book they are reading to help authors pull through if the author decides to go with it; and at level 6, the ability to promote books by upvoting the works they deem valuable. Valuable readers are ultimately rewarded with a free month of premium reading access upon reaching level 7.

Is level 7 one time and done? No. Once level 7 is unlocked you drop back to level 6, and by continuing to be a valuable member of the community you may keep unlocking level 7 indefinitely.

What do readers actually see?

Spark of Tales allows readers to see more than just words. They can see the meaning, they can read the manifest as it was developed, and they can read more context in each event of the chapter, figuring out what the author had to go through: completing an event, answering a question, accepting someone's suggestion, and so on.

Readers can also engage with a book that is currently being written and read the latest event live as it is being written, whenever the writer leaves live drafts switched on.

As for the book preview, the first event of every chapter is visible, and in the chapter currently being written the latest event and the live draft are visible to everyone as well, while the rest stays hidden until you unlock the book to read it fully.

Books have no cover art and are fairly judged by their name, tags and description, making the author's writing ability the only advertisement available for each book, which is the fairest model for a writer that does not want to deal with the marketing and publishing ordeals.

Earning on Spark of Tales

Writers may earn from the platform and sell the books they write there freely. A subscription is also available, and 80% of all subscription revenue forms the writer pool, which is always visible to all authors in the Dashboard and is split by how much of the month's premium reading each writer earned. Their share of the pool is constantly updated and visible at all times, so they know exactly what they will earn from the total monthly pool.

Is selling the only way to earn money? Not really. On Spark of Tales even readers can get a portion of the sales. As it is deemed fair that a reader who helps an author with level 5 event writing, where the author accepts the contribution, should share in the result, that reader receives partial ownership. In this case the author is sharing 5% of the book's net earnings with all the readers whose full event suggestions were accepted, and those readers share that pool between themselves. It is a relatively small pool, but it pays off to help out, and the partial ownership is recognized by the platform automatically. A reader whose substantial suggestion is accepted also earns a free copy of the book once it is completed, as thanks for providing a helpful hand during its writing.

Another way to earn is through community events. There may be an ongoing event on the site which contains monetary rewards, and those events have stretch goals which, when holding a monetary value, add to the prize pool. Whatever is running right now is shown on the home page.

Getting started

Writing on Spark of Tales is free. Start a world, start a book, and write your first event. If you would rather read first, the library is open, and some stories are being written as you read them.

Questions are welcome at support@sparkoftales.com. See you there.