FAQs and Video tutorials

Reading stories

No. Following a story specifically allows you to stay on top of all future updates to that story through notifications via email or on the site. Also, following a story allows you to quickly access it from your library. Adding a story to a reading list basically helps you better organize your current, finished, or read readings, and share those lists with others. If you have a story on your reading list, and you are not following it, then you will not receive updates to new chapters.
To add a story to a reading list, you just have to visit the profile of the story and click on the icon with the "3 dots". Once you click, you can add the story to one or more reading lists. To create a reading list, just go to Library> Reading Lists > Create a new reading list. For non-Premium users, it is only allowed to create a maximum of 3 simultaneous and public reading lists. Premium users have no limits and can create private lists.
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.

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 scrolling down to the chapter's list and clicking on "Publish" in the chapter you want to publish. Published stories will be available for reading immediately in the mobile apps and also on the web.
There are 3 kinds of stories that you can create: text stories, visual stories (comics) and Universes. 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", which 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.
Inkspired, at the moment, has 2 mobile apps on both: Apple App Store and Google Play Store. The app called "Inkspired Reader Mobile" is specifically for reading. For writing, please download the app called "Inkspired Writer". Both are free apps.
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 (40,000 characters).
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 not. 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.
Each author has the right to place hashtags the way they want, but in order to standardize and facilitate searches, we decided to put the category first (Naruto, Dragon Ball, BTS, Supernatural, Harry Potter, for example) and then the characters. We use “bar” to indicate a romantic relationship (Shikamaru / Temari, for example) and “&” to indicate another type of relationship (Sasuke & Sarada, for example, since their relationship is familiar). This prevents people who are looking for friendship fanfics between John Watson and Sherlock Holmes, for example, from ending up in the wrong stories. Thus, John Watson / Sherlock Holmes (alphabetical order to avoid problems) would be in romantic relationships and John Watson & Sherlock Holmes in stories where they are just friends.
The review works as a recommendation. The author could not answer it in any way (however, moderation will be the result of hate and not of constructive criticism), so it serves as a way for the animal readers to read other stories. The comments are messages you give by chapter to the author; he can contest them as many times as he wants and is an excellent way to animate him further writing.

Receiving Payments

To activate the payment service, you must send a request through the "Options and Services" button located in your story profile, in the Control Panel. However, to complete the process, you must first meet the requirements indicated in the instructions that you will see when trying to activate it. If you meet all the requirements, you can continue with the process. Do not worry, the system will guide you at all times, step by step, through the process, and will indicate if you need to fill in any additional information or if you need to fulfill any other requirement. Finally, you must accept the terms of conditions and then submit the form. In a few days, you will receive an email confirming or denying your request.
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 25% of administration fee (15% if you are a premium member) for each donation/payment you receive, which 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.
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 receive the funds from all payments transferred at once to your PayPal (Transferwise, Revolut, or Europen Union, British, Ecuadorian, or Chilean bank account) on the 1st day of each month after the purchase/donation. To receive the funds successfully, you must have a minimum of US $25 accumulated. 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 US $25 or higher.
Yes, it is possible. To do so, you need to go to your "Payments received" list. If the payments have not been transferred to your bank yet, just click on the option that says "Transfers & More" on each payment, and you will see a button that will allow you to transfer those funds to your Inkspired Wallet. You can use your funds stored in your Wallet to purchase any other story, product, or service on the platform. Just have in mind that once transferred into your Wallet, you cannot withdraw it or transfer it to your bank account anymore.
It depends. Officially, we allow transfers to PayPal accounts, Transferwise, Payooner, and Revolut. We can also make direct bank transfers to US bank accounts, European Union bank accounts, British bank accounts, Australian bank accounts, Chilean and Ecuadorian bank accounts. We are working on this year to enable more direct transfers in more countries in Latin America. We are committed to supporting creators to make money out of their work, wherever they are!

Paying for stories or services

If a story is a paid story or accepting donations, you will see it directly on the story profile just below its own cover picture. In the case of paid stories, you will see the pricing and you will not be allowed to continue reading beyond the first chapter unless you purchase the story. In the case of donations, a blue button will be shown at all times just below the cover picture or the story title, but you may continue reading without hitting a paywall.
No. You can use a PayPal account or your credit/debit card. We accept payment with bank transfer also in exceptional cases.
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 Stripe and PayPal platform for this, and they handle 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 [email protected] 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 US $2 and no more than US $1000 per transaction. It is possible to donate more by making more transactions.
You have a few options :) Of course, you have the traditional Credit/Debit card option. It's possible to also pay via Paypal, or even get in touch with us directly to manage a direct transaction. If you are in some countries in Latin America, you will get extra options. Some countries can pay using cash payments, bank transfers, e-wallets, online banking, local debit cards, and even pay in installments. Please read the Inkspired Wallet section for more information.

Adding Chapters' Reviewers or Beta Readers

A BETA Reader is a third-party reader who reads your story and gives you constructive feedback on it. Inkspired has a BETA reader service that is accessible from the Self Publishing Services page. BETA Readers have a mission to provide you with feedback to help you improve. The difference with reviewers is that a reviewer must be added for you. You, as the author, decide who to add privately to be the reviewer of your draft, while a Beta Reader is brought by us, as a platform, to provide you with advice.
Becoming a BETA Reader is voluntary. Similar to becoming an Inkspired Ambassador (https://getinkspired.com/ambassadors). The requirements to become a BETA Reader is to have time availability of a couple of hours a week, and encouragement to want to help others with your readings through constructive feedback. Your obligation will be to attend to the requests for readings that other authors send. If you want to apply to become a BETA reader contact us at [email protected]
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.

Writer Premium

Writer Premium is a subscription that unlocks dozens of benefits and features in the platform, and could even help you make more money. It's possible to upgrade in the monthly plan or the annual plan. The annual plan will save more than 3 months of the monthly subscription fee and also have additional perks included; we recommend it as the best deal. Read all the current benefits of the subscription by going to: https://getinkspired.com/writer/premium. You can upgrade using Credit Card, PayPal, or the Inkspired Wallet.
It's possible to cancel anytime. To do so, please just go to Settings > Subscription. Find your subscription there, and unselect the option with the label "Automatic renewal". A confirmation message should be displayed afterward confirming your preference has been updated. That's it! Your subscription will not renew when it expires, and you will not be charged again.
To change your plan, you will first need to deactivate your current plan to avoid double charges. Just follow the steps for cancelling your subscription, and then purchase the new plan.

Inkspired Wallet

The Inkspired Wallet is a new payment method added to the standard ones of Credit Card and PayPal. It serves as a means to store funds on your Inkspired account and use it later to buy any product or service across all the platforms while earning bonus Rewards Credits for it. You can use those funds either to pay the full amount of a product or service, or just a portion of it.
There are many advantages. First, it allows you to control easily the payments you make on the website by managing your budget; if your card is charging you extra commissions for every payment you make, using the Wallet can help you save some money by topping up fewer times. Secondly, it allows you to top up your Wallet using your own local payment methods and cards (for some countries, you can even pay in cash or in installments). Third, you can even use the funds you have earned on sales of your own stories and transfer them directly to your Wallet to use it on the website; it's super convenient! Fourth, for every top up and use of your Inkspired Wallet, you will get bonus Rewards Credits that will help you to increase your Rewards Level and access further benefits on the platform.
You can top up your Inkspired Wallet by Credit Card, PayPal, Direct Bank Transfer (to EU/US bank accounts), or specific local payment methods depending on your country. For example, we allow OXXO cash payments in Mexico or "Boleto" in Brazil; each country has different options. Other ways to top up your Inkspired Wallet is by transferring your funds earned from sales to your wallet or via a Gift Card.
You can use your Inkspired Wallet to make payments in US Dollars, Euros, and British Pounds. However, it's possible to top up your Inkspired Wallet by making a payment in Reais (Brazil), MXN (Mexico), or other Latin American local currencies, although the amount that will reflect in your Wallet available to make payments will always be converted to either USD, EUR or GBP as you choose.
Currently, we have the standard payment methods of Credit Cards and Paypal (also Debit Cards that are enabled for online payments). If you are in specific countries in LATAM, we are also enabling Cash Payments, Bank Transfers, Online Banking, local debit cards, and other e-wallets depend on the exact country you reside. Some countries also have "payments in installments" enabled.
Some countries are able to make Cash Payments and Bank Transfers using local processes. Whenever you create an order and choose any of those, you are order becomes "Pending" until the payment can be confirmed. You have a maximum of 3 days to make the payment according to the instructions that are sent to you, otherwise, your order will be canceled. From the moment you make the payment, it could take from 1 hour to up to 72 hours to be reflected on the system.
We use the systems of other partners in order to make local payments possible. At the moment we have partnered with EBANX (and we will with others in the future too) to help us receive your payments in every country in LATAM. It's totally normal to end up in their checkout page, and you can trust your payment is in safe hands.
Unfortunately, managing payments indirectly (such as receiving payments in countries we do not have an office yet) incurs extra cost. Some of these costs we are assuming ourselves, but in order to make this happen, every local payment method needs to add up the extra administration fees. In some countries, like Colombia, we are required by law to add the TAX fee. We understand these extra fees make it more expensive to use, but we are convinced its convenience justifies it.
Currently, we are supporting local payments only in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Bolivia, Uruguay, Ecuador, and Peru. We are working hard to add some new countries during this year. You need to be physically in any of these countries in order to get the options for local payments. If you are not in any of them, but you still have a local credit card from one of them, just make sure your "Country" setting is set up correctly in your profile.

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