An online story writing platform is a website or app where anyone can write and publish stories, and anyone can read them, mostly for free. The best-known Indian platforms work mainly in Indian languages, such as Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam and Gujarati. Writers publish a story chapter by chapter, and readers follow it as new chapters appear, as people once followed a serial in a magazine.
Here is how it works. A writer opens an account on her phone and types a chapter in her own script, using the phone's Marathi or Tamil keyboard. She adds a title, a cover image and a genre, such as romance, family drama or horror. Readers find stories through a recommendation system, which ranks stories by what similar readers have read and finished. Readers rate each chapter, write comments and follow the writers they like. When a writer posts a new chapter, every follower receives a notification.
For instance, a homemaker in Nashik starts a Marathi family drama about two sisters-in-law. She posts one chapter of about 2,000 words every two days. After three months, she has 45 chapters and 9,000 followers. The platform then invites her to make her newest chapters paid. Her first chapters stay free. A reader who wants the newest chapter immediately pays with coins, the platform's virtual currency, or with a reader subscription. Other readers can wait until the chapter becomes free. Each month, the platform pays her a share of what readers spent on her story.
A popular story can also earn outside the platform. The platform can license it to an audio series app, which turns it into an audio drama with voice artists. Other stories become comics or web series. The writer receives a share of each such deal, under her contract with the platform.
Because anyone can publish, the platform must deal with misuse. Some users copy another writer's story and post it under their own name. Some post harmful content. Readers report such stories, and the reports go to a trust and safety investigation team. The team compares the two texts or reads the reported story. It then decides whether to remove the story, and can suspend the account.
Why do these platforms exist mainly in Indian languages? Hundreds of millions of Indians came online on cheap phones, and many of them read most comfortably in their own language. Few publishers printed new fiction for them, and few new writers could get a book published. This is described in the vernacular internet.
How is it different from a blog or an ebook store? A blog belongs to one writer, who must find readers alone. An ebook store sells finished books. A story writing platform gives every writer a ready audience in her language, and lets her publish a story while she is still writing it.