FAQs und Video-Tutorials

Web und apps

Publishing stories

Yes. Inkspired is for both readers and writers. You can create any number of stories for free using the Dashboard on the web (whereas the mobile app is for reading rather than posting stories). To publish a story: 1) Go to Dashboard 2) Click on "Create a new story" 3) Write your first chapter and save it 4) Fill in the required fields (those marked with red asterisks) in your Story Profile 5) And finally, publish your chapter by changing its status from "Draft" to "Published". Published stories will be available for reading immediately in the mobile apps and also on the web.
There are 2 kinds of stories that you can create: text stories and visual stories (comics). Text stories can be "stories with chapters", "short tales", "microfictions", "interactive stories" and "blogs". You can post stories as a series or just a one-off chapter. All of these are text-based stories in different formats, such as the "story with chapters" and "short tale", that are traditional formats for storytelling, novels, and books. "Microfiction" stories only allow you to post stories up to 500 characters only through mobile apps. Interactive Stories, on the other hand, allows you to create multiple story paths and story plots, and you need to link each chapter with decisions for the readers to make. Visual Stories, on the contrary, allows you to tell stories only with the use of images and no text; it's commonly used for webcomics.
If you have created a story with the Dashboard and you can't find it using the search feature in the app or in our website, please check the status of the story in your story's profile. The status of the story must be "published" in order to appear in the app, and in order to get that status, at least one of the chapters in it must have the "published" status as well.
Yes. Inkspired is just a platform. All the content published on it is owned by its respective owners. Inkspired won't take any credit or responsibility for any content published by users.
It depends on you. The front cover picture is the first impression that the readers will have of your story. It matters, it sells the book, and people will judge the story based on it (it's true). However, it is not a mandatory field. You can still publish a story without having one, and a default front cover picture that says "Inkspired" will be used for it. Don't panic. Inkspired will help you through the process. If you don't have a professional front cover picture for your story or book, you can upload a photo instead. The Dashboard will allow you to use that photo as your front cover picture or even suggest pre-designed templates with your name and your story's name on it.
Yes. You can choose between choosing a story type called "Short tale" or you can create a "serial text story" with only one chapter. Publish it and mark it as "Complete". The difference between the first option and the second is that "Short tales" does not allow you to create more chapters and has character limitations.
Each time an author publishes a story in Inkspired, it is automatically published as "Waiting for review". Do not worry, your story has been published, and it can be read and accessed by readers. However, Inkspired, in its mission to provide the best stories to our readers, verifies that all the stories published in our catalog comply with our "Community Guidelines" and "Terms of Use." Once a story has been "verified" by a member of our team, the story will automatically change to a "Verified" status, and will be included in our "official" Inkspired catalog to begin being recommended to our thousands of readers. If a story does not meet our quality standards or "Community Guidelines", it may be "Rejected" and unpublished. The aim of this process is readers and writers in our community can enjoy safe and quality content.
Only "Short tales". However, we believe that less is more, and we like the idea of micro-chapters, since they are easier to read and access. It's a great advice to keep your readers engaged.
Yes, but only because of two reasons. The first one is if the content violates Inkspired's Terms of Use, with inappropriate content, content reported by users, or if it is not rated correctly. But the initial action will always be to contact the author first. The second reason might be because of "quality" reasons: Inkspired will unpublish any chapter it considers that is made up of "dummy-text" or "test content", with no intention of telling a story. Authors will be able to get feedback from Inkspired, and also will be able to attempt to re-publish it after modifying the content to comply with the Terms of Use.
Of course. The idea behind Inkspired is giving your story the potential of always being a "work-in-progress": publish, review, refine, publish again. When you publish a story or a chapter, you are able to edit its content the number of times you feel is necessary, anytime. However, we would like to advise our writers to not abuse this by doing radical changes on the storyline, since it can break the readers' flow if they are already following your story. If needed, you can also contact all your followers through the dashboard and warn them about any radical change you may have.
Absolutely no. As you keep all the rights and ownership of your published stories, you are entitled to publish it elsewhere in any other way of publishing you may want too. Although, if you still like to mention us as your initial platform for publishing, we will be really happy about that :)

Managing stories and account

We believe in stories that are constantly evolving. A story can have a maximum of 100 chapters. If you run out of chapters for your story, you can create a new story as a sequel of the first one.
Your content will be accessible to you at every moment. Even if your account gets blocked (from publishing) for any reason, you will still be able to access your stories and download them.
Yes. You can send a message to all your followers via email every 10 days, and you can only contact those who are following your story. To do this, go to your Dashboard. Access your story's profile, and click on the Followers. There is a button titled "Send a message to followers". The reason why you can only send a message every 10 days is because we want to avoid spam on our readers' emails. Another way to contact them via notifications is to use the "Share Announcement" or "Share Update" option, and attach one of your stories with it. The option will post a message on your user profile and will notify your followers immediately.
Users can upload any image size and the tool will offer a Crop option to adapt it to the Inkspired's standard. However, if you want to design a front cover yourself, Inkspired's perfect proportion is 600x907 pixels (width x height); for quality purposes, is recommended to not upload an image lower than 400x607 pixels. Do not try to upload images with a width or height bigger than 1500px, or any image with a filesize higher than 2mb.
Yes. As we must standardize the sizing of every cover image when you upload a picture you need to crop it to fit our standard cover size. However, you can adapt your images beforehand, and choose the original picture when you upload it, so you get the desired result.
To view your reviews, you will need to go to your dashboard. Click on the story, and on the chapter list, you will see a column with the number of reviews that chapter has. If the number is not 0, you will be able to click it and see the list of all the reviews in that chapter along with the star rating you got and get to see the user who sent it.
A hashtag is a word that describes your story. We need you to enter some of them when you are filling the information in your Story Profile, so readers will be able to discover your story faster. A hashtag will allow them to search for "words" in the search bar like "castles", "dragons" or "vampires". If your story has this hashtags, there is a higher probability to get a better exposure to them. Use them as a "subcategory" rather than entering just random words.
There is no automatic unpublishing. If you miss a deadline, you will start getting reminders to update your chapter. The amounts of reminders may vary in each case. After a certain period, Inkspired reserves the right to unpublish the story (just in extreme cases), change its status to "Completed", or any other action as specified in our Terms of Use.

Receiving Payments

To activate the contribution service, you will have to submit a request through the dashboard, in your story profile. However, before you must comply with the following pre-requisites: 1.- Your story must be an "in-progress" story, not a "completed" story. 2.- You must commit to updating it regularly as stated in your "update frequency" field. 3.- Have all of your User Profile information complete. After this, there is a button that will let you submit the request, where you will be guided through the activation process, we will require you to fill out all your User Profile information (if it's not filled yet) and enter your own PayPal account; this information is mandatory to get your Account Verified, and to activate your contribution service. Only verified accounts are able to use this feature. Finally, you will have to agree to the terms and conditions and then submit the form. Within 48 - 72 hours, you will receive an e-mail confirming or denying your account verification and contribution service request.
Yes, is mandatory. You will need it since we will be transferring to that account only, all the contributions made by your readers. Unfortunately, there are no more options for receiving funds at the moment, however, we are working on this.
We encourage all our users to make sure that the PayPal account entered in the User Profile is the one that belongs to you or an account that you have access to. We will remind you this at the moment of activating the service, however, Inkspired holds no liability for misspelled e-mail address entered as PayPal accounts. If your PayPal account gets blocked, unfortunately, we won't be able to assist you or provide any kind of support, as PayPal is a third-party service. You will need to contact PayPal directly.
Inkspired charges a 15% of administration fee for each contribution you receive, that will be automatically deducted from the final amount. There is no extra fee or charge.
Please check if the stories are "in-progress stories". If there are "completed stories", you won't be able to activate or see the option.
In case you forget to update your story, the General Terms and Conditions of Inkspired apply. The Story could be unpublished or its status changed; meaning that in any case, the contribution service will be turned off too. If your story's status changes to "Completed", the contribution service will be turned off. Only "in progress" . stories" may have the service active.
If it got rejected, it could be because you didn't comply with the pre-requisites or the information of the story is incomplete. Please, try completing all the profile information and try submitting a new request again.
You will see the funds from all your donations received transferred at once to your PayPal account on the 1st day of each month after it was initially pledged in our platform if it is not canceled by the pledger. To receive the funds successfully, you must have a minimum of USD $10 accumulated in your pledges. If it's lower, the transfer will be postponed until the next payout cycle (on the 1st day of the next month) if by that time the overall amount is already USD $10 or higher. We are working hard to be able to make more frequent payout cycles. A friend contributed with a donation to my story, when I will receive it in my PayPal account?

Paying for stories

If a story allows receiving contributions, just visit the story's profile and in the right column, you will be able to see a button with the label "Contribute now".
No. You can use a PayPal account or your credit card.
We use SSL and other security measures to be a safe site, and we do care about it. Also, we do not store or handle any transactions, as we use the PayPal platform for this, and PayPal handles all of that information for you.
After submitting a one-time contribution pledge, your credit card will be charged immediately. In the case of a monthly recurrent contribution pledge, your credit card will be charged with the first payment in 24 hours after the initial pledge. You may request a refund directly to info@getinkspired.com or cancel a monthly recurrent contribution from the Dashboard within 24 hours from the pledge, and it must be at least 72 hours before the payout cycle. After that period of time, unfortunately, refund requests cannot be accepted.
When contributing, your contribution should be at least USD 0.99 and no more than USD 999 per transaction. It is possible to contribute more doing more transactions.

Reading stories

Yes. In the app, you can access the story profile, and click "Options" in the right corner of the upper title bar. There will be an option called "Report content", and from there you can submit us your report. On the website, the link to report a story is at the bottom of each chapter.
The difference is the what kind of notifications you may want to receive. By following a story, you will only get notifications of all the updates done to that specific story. For example, when there is a new chapter available for reading. In the other hand, by following the user/author, will get a complete set of notifications about his/her activity, including the release of a new story, new chapter's releases in any story he/she makes an update, and more.
Yes. There are two ways of doing that, and you can find both in the same place. While reading the chapter, go to the "Options" button in the right corner of the screen. It will only appear if you tap the content. From there, you can save the chapter for "offline reading" or "like" the chapter. Both options are for different purposes: the first one allows you to be able to continue reading the chapter without an internet connection, but you can only have a maximum of five chapters stored this way. The second option allows you to bookmark any chapter you like. Both lists can be accessed through the Pocket Library option in the app's main menu.

Adding Chapters' Reviewers or Beta Readers

While you are writing the draft of one of your chapters, you can add Reviewers or Beta readers to it. These users will be able to see this chapter even if it's still in "draft" or "unpublished", so they can write comments on each line, sentence or paragraphs, without being able to edit the original text. This is a way of getting feedback from your draft before publishing it.
You can add any user on Inkspired by using its "username", or friends that are not on Inkspired by using their e-mail addresses. However, for the latter, they will receive an invitation via e-mail to sign up first, so they can proceed to review your draft chapter. It is a straightforward process, fast, simple and very friendly.
No. Only you as the author and the reviewers can see these private comments/notes in your draft chapter. Even if your chapter is published, only the reviewers or beta readers may be able to see those notes; normal readers will not be able to view them.

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