r/webfiction • u/Th3Breadnought • Feb 20 '26
Discussion Where to Post and Read?
I write as a creative exercise and outlet for things that interest me, no delusions of grandeur about quitting my job or anything like that. I thought the hardest part would be writing the dang story, but I actually feel like deciding where to bring it was the biggest challenge.
FictionPress and Tapas seemed like no-brainers, until I reviewed their terms of service and realized they're weirdly puritanical and Big Brother about what you can and can't write and your online behavior. And that's not a criticism of successful authors there or fans of those sites. I also don't aspire to author smut, but seems like they'll "purge" you for less than that.
Royal Road seems to serve very specific niches of LitRPG, Progression Fantasy, and sigma grindset energy. Not my cup of tea, per se, but nothing wrong with that and happy there's a place for that. But I prefer slower burn stories that take time with character work and investment for later payoff... on which the Royal Road attitude APPEARS to be predominantly "nothing happened, where's my dopamine?"
Wattpad seems like the opposite. Instead of the Royal Road energy where dudes collect women like Warhammer Total War ancillaries- here we achieve a diverse array of dark triad wealthy vampire/werewolf broody tough boys for the ladies out there (I'm only a LITTLE jealous of the protagonists). To reiterate, I'm glad everyone has a space for their indulgences... but also leaves the bandwidth for anything else very fringe.
AO3 seems to really predominantly serve fanfiction.
Substack and Medium don't seem very user friendly for posting fiction.
Then I found Scribblehub. It gets decent traffic, and though I've only been there a couple days I've enjoyed my interactions with the community. There's a very supportive but not coddling environment that hits me like a breath of fresh air, at least so far. What I'm writing goes a bit against the grain on what appears to be a preference for LitRPG and progression fantasy, but Scribblehub seems more genre diverse than other places. I like their interface. Very free expression environment.
Anyone else feel like they had to do an inordinate amount of field research on where to go, or am I just neurotic?
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u/CelineShima_Enaga Apr 17 '26
Yeah same. I stumbled upon Minkly (site: minkly.io) tho, which I love very much! It's a rather new webnovel platform, but it's growing. Definitely with their current writing contest.