For Your Pleasure...
The All Hearts Cabaret is Open!
A year ago I met a man named Michael Evans. He was in the midst of building a new subscription platform. One that had the reader-friendly interface of the big players, but that worked to but the creators' needs first. Radical thinking in a landscape dominated by platforms who could at any time decide your content is too steamy or too strange, sometimes based on nothing more than an algorithm's fussy filters.
I'm not in the mood to have Patreon's shareholders take my career hostage, which is why I have launched my subscription on Ream. There's a lot of free samples, or follow for more chapters and stories. It is very much a work in progress, and I'm looking forward to expanding the tiers to include merch, paperbacks, book boxes, and anything else I can think of to tempt the discerning reader (that means you) and give them more than their money's worth.
But why a subscription? Aren't I just adding another chore to my unending list of them? Yes and no. I will be publishing many (if not all) of the books at the All Hearts Cabaret eventually, but I'm creating this subscription with the belief that different readers like to read in different ways. Lots of people love serial fiction (think Wattpad, Radish, Royal Road etc) and many readers want to know that their book-buying dollars are going to the author and not to a bunch of gatekeepers. Subscriptions also allow me to build a real community outside the often hostile landscape of social media. Why let tech bros stand between us when we could build our own network of people who love queer happy endings and love of all colours?
So please visit https://reamstories.com/willforrest and tell me what you think! The site is approximately twenty minutes old, so bear with me while I get used to this wholly new way to bring readers and stories together.