[THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO ALL STEAMY ROMANCE AUTHORS IN SUBSCRIPTIONS].
Note: This was written in March 2023, in response to a recent ban that a subscription platform put in place on steamy romance content. I was fired up and wanted to share why and how Ream is different. Here it is…
Emilia Rose and I have been working on Ream along with Sean Patnode for over a year now. And one of our first big goals was to create a space where we would never censor romance authors. Emilia and hundreds of other steamy authors have had their content taken down on Patreon and other platforms. We not only wanted to create a platform that is the best, easiest, and most powerful for fiction authors to host their subscriptions — but one that is more inclusive and accepting.
So we set out from day one to create this place with intentionality. First, some facts about payment processing platforms. Adyen, Checkout, PayPal, and Stripe are the major payment processors that every platform uses. All of them ban adult content in their TOS. At Ream, we use Stripe to process our payments. At the surface, this may seem odd. How can we be using Stripe to process payments for adult content if they aren’t supportive of it in their TOS? Well, Stripe makes a few exceptions. They are the main processor that OnlyFans uses to process their payments (for those that don’t know OnlyFans is a notorious adult content platform…https://zenpayments.com/what-payment-processor-does-onlyfans-use/). They also process the payments of every book in the Kindle Store and recently inked a deal with Amazon to do so (https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/amazon-and-stripe).
And back in July, long before we even integrated with Stripe, we secured an exception with the Stripe team to process payments for erotic literature and NSFW art that follows our very open content guidelines (you can find those here: https://reamstories.com/policy/content-guidelines).
So why do platforms like BMAC, who use the same payment processors that Ream, OnlyFans of all places, and Amazon’s Kindle Store (which their most liquid category on the entire Amazon store… out of all hundreds of thousands of product categories… is steamy romance books), not allow adult content?
The answer comes down to institutional investors and restrictions on where capital flows as well as a diversity of content formats and app store regulations. In what follows, you will discover how nearly every other platform works… and why Ream is very different.
Patreon is owned by Venture Capitalists. There is nothing wrong with VC. But their business model necessitates huge risk for companies and massive gains and market share (usually outcomes of $1 billion+) in order to make the fund return a desirable return for its limited partner.
In Patreon’s case, VCs have pumped over 300 million dollars into the company and own 60%+ of the shares in the company. The investors and institutions they raise these funds from often have restrictions on their money, such as investing in adult content. Thus, even if BMAC (company backed by YC and other venture funds), Substack (venture capital backed company by Y Combinator, A16z with over $60 million in funding ), Kofi (venture capital backed company), and Patreon (venture capital backed company with loads of funding and is still barely profitable), use adult content creators to grow their platform, they are ultimately forced to ditch them.
These are deliberate decisions made by the C-Suite… and they use every excuse in the book (such as blaming it on payment processors when deals can be negotiated, and especially high-risk payments can be cascaded to other high-risk payment providers… more on this soon). For instance in an Information article titled “Where Patreon Goes from Here” (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/where-patreon-goes-from-here) the CEO of the company, Jack Conte, was said to be actively suppressing adult content on the site. I quote: “But Conte doesn’t want adult content to prosper on the site, and told employees he wants to keep that percentage under 50%, a person with direct knowledge of the discussions told Paris.”
BMAC, Substack, all of these companies have the same incentives. They need to grow massively big to create meaningful profit for their investors (often this bigness comes at the EXPENSE of creators) — and they have to meet the requirements that these institutional funds demand. OnlyFans, which is roughly 10x bigger in terms of payment volume than Patreon, has struggled to find any investors and was completely bootstrapped by the founders. They make 50x more profit than all of the companies listed above in Patreon, Substack, Kofi, and BMAC — yet the founders are unable to exit their shares cause no one wants to buy them. Even though the company is literally printing cash ($250 million distribution to one of its founders last year alone).
With Amazon being so massive and them narrowly focused on erotic literature instead of other content formats, they not only have massive bargaining power, but also a unique advantage in the content format they focus on to be more open to steamy romance authors. This is because 10 years ago platforms like Smashwords worked to set a precedent that erotic literature should be categorized and regulated differently by payment processors than other forms of adult content.
But Amazon is also not as open as they should be to steamy romance authors and regularly shuts down the accounts of dark romance authors. Why is that? Well, one is that they don’t want to risk PR and all the other things that a huge publicly traded company would be worried about when it comes to the public finding out about taboo content on the platform. In reality, a lot of these concerns are overblown, as “taboo” is a social construct and it’s boundary is contingent, personal, and constantly changing.
But there’s one more BIG element to this. The app stores. BMAC, Patreon, Substack, Kofi, and Amazon… all of them have native applications in the IOS and Android stores. Apple has extremely restrictive policies around adult content, which limits what these platforms can do even further.
So with all of this said — it is really hard being a steamy romance author. Frankly, every platform wants to use you and once they have scaled beyond you, spit you out and kick you off the platform.
Ream has a different DNA — from the ground up.
And I’ll tell you why.
This is VERY important to us. In fact, it is one of our foundational beliefs and one of our biggest promises to our authors. If we can’t create a place where our cofounder and steamy romance author Emilia Rose can safely and effectively share the stories she wants then we have failed in our mission. We have failed to create a place where Storytellers Rule the World and instead, one where institutional investors, white-suited businessmen, and platforms make heavy-handed policies that affect creators such as the amazing romance authors we are already supporting on Ream that are empowering readers to live their best lives, lead healthier relationships, and cope with trauma, break ups, and a world that can be hard and lonely by delivering them joys and thrills with their character and stories. What is more beautiful than that?
Well first, investors don’t care about any of that. They care about profit at scale. It’s not worthwhile for someone to take a bet on a high-risk technology company unless they can get outsized returns. Emilia and I have chatted with many venture capitalists. I go to Harvard University and am a junior here. Many of my friends have raised VC rounds and let’s just say… I see the inside of that world. It’s a fine world and I respect many of the investors. But they don’t understand fiction and publishing. It’s almost laughable. They say it’s too niche. Not a big enough market. And something they would never invest in. It’s why none of the aforementioned platforms focus on fiction. They want to serve all writers, all creators, all artists, and in the process have completely overlooked fiction authors.
So what did we do? We built this company bootstrapped like every author has built their publishing business. We took a grand total of $0 from outside investors. Sean quit his full-time job in January and I have been juggling college and Ream to make this dream come true for all of us. We wanted to do this right and we wanted to create this by fiction authors for fiction authors. That’s not empty words. That’s how we approach our everyday process— including the very real situation of being scrappy in the beginning, having to be uber smart with our time, and for an investment of our passion being the greatest source of capital we have.
What does it mean for Ream to truly be owned and led by authors? It means we can answer to ourselves and fight for the mission, values, and people we believe in. This means that we always will only answer to our fiction authors and readers. We aren’t worried about being the next Facebook — we have grounded, achievable goals centered on our authors, not the next round of metrics to impress some investors in a board room. And we answer to all of you. No one else.
That also means we can build on a different infrastructure. We can be intentional about the decisions we make and the partners we chose. With a narrow focus on fiction and some NSFW art related to the fiction stories on Ream, we have been able to forge partnerships that enable greater content freedom on Ream than nearly anywhere else on the internet for steamy romance authors with World Class infrastructure that as of 30 days from now will pay out to authors in more than 130 countries. We also hedge our bets, and know that we can’t always rely on our partners forever. That’s why our financial back end with Stripe allows us to export payments to other processors so that if times change and there is a crack down on our steamy romance authors, we can migrate requisite payments elsewhere to less robust high-risk payment processors that we also have relationships with.
We can also build on new advanced infrastructure as a result of starting in 2023 — not 2013. With the rise of progressive web apps and push notifications being rolled out on IOS devices as of January 2023, we can have mobile app across all devices without ever being in the Apple or Google Play store. With both companies rolling out support for this and with companies like Uber adopting this new technology, we now can create a better payment and app experience for readers than other platforms while enabling our authors to have greater control and freedom in the content they create.
So in short. Payments are messy. Payments are complicated. And payments are something we don’t ever want any of our authors to worry about. Our team has spent upwards of 1000 hours on this in the last year alone, and will likely spend thousands of more hours in the coming years building relationships, expanding and diversifying our infrastructure, and continuously fighting for our steamy romance authors.
We truly have a different DNA. And when you look at other platforms, just know there is SO much going on under the hood. And when I see the message above from BMAC, as the CEO and co-founder of a platform with a very similar business, all I have to say is that, there’s more to that message than they are letting on. The same people they process payments for process payments for the entire Amazon Kindle Store and OnlyFans. With that said — at the end of the day, the bigger question to ask ourselves as authors when partnering with a platform is are their values aligned with mine? And do they have my best interests in mind?
I can’t tell you what the right choice is. But what I can tell you, is that we are fighting and working tirelessly every day to create a future where Storytellers Rule the World. And in just 1 year, with a team of 3, I think we have created the start of something really special. I’m excited to see where the next year will go. And excited to have you all along for the ride with us. We created this for you. And we created this because we saw the writing on the wall.
If no one will stick up for us as authors — we have to do it ourselves. I’ve been writing science fiction novels since I was 13, published 12 books, and have dumped every penny and every free hour of my life since 15 into this industry. There’s been some high highs and some very low lows.
There will never be a perfect platform— a perfect world or a perfect publishing industry. Payments likewise are messy and convoluted. But payments are all about who and what we value and how we choose to exchange and show that.
And at Ream, we value our steamy romance authors. Storytelling is what makes us human, and love is the greatest thing we have to lead and experience happy lives. Love and passion are what make life worth living, no matter how dark, kinky, or “weird” that passion is. It deserves to be expressed. It deserves to be heard. And it deserves to connect with others.
We are that home.
You can sign up for Ream here: https://authors.reamstories.com
P.S. Feel free to share this message and post far and wide. It’s important we as authors understand the underbellies of this industry, and I’m happy to answer any questions people have. Reach out at authorsuccess@reamstories.com