Why We Built VelvetChapters — An Interactive Fiction Marketplace for Indie Authors

In December 2025, Radish Fiction — a serialized fiction platform with hundreds of thousands of readers and thousands of active authors — shut down. No long warning. No migration tool. Authors who had spent years building their audience, publishing thousands of episodes, watched their readership evaporate overnight.

Some had paywalled series mid-chapter. Some had promised their readers a conclusion they could no longer deliver on the same platform. Some had their sole income from writing wiped out in a single announcement email.

This wasn't a surprise to anyone paying attention to the space. The same story has played out on Kindle Vella, Tapas, JukePop, and a dozen other serialized fiction platforms over the past decade. Platforms launch, promise authors a home, grow, then either pivot away from fiction, get acquired and gutted, or simply run out of money. The authors — who built the platform's value in the first place — are left holding nothing.

We built VelvetChapters because we believe indie authors deserve better than that.

What the Radish Shutdown Actually Cost Authors

The financial hit was obvious. But the deeper loss was something harder to quantify: relationship capital. Authors on Radish had spent years building parasocial relationships with readers. Readers who knew their update schedule, who left comments after every episode, who had bought multiple series and were invested in fictional worlds the author had built.

When the platform closes, that relationship doesn't transfer to an email list. Most authors had no way to contact their readers directly. The platform owned that connection — not the author.

Beyond the relationship loss: revenue contracts. Many Radish authors had committed to exclusive publication schedules in exchange for creator fund payments or advance contracts. When the platform shuttered, those contracts became worthless — but the exclusivity clauses often complicated republishing elsewhere.

The lesson is clear: building your writing career on someone else's infrastructure is a bet on their business surviving. Most platforms won't.

Why Interactive Fiction, Specifically

When we looked at where serialized fiction was heading, one format kept coming up in conversations with readers: branching narratives. Choose-your-own-adventure stories. Stories where your choices shape the outcome.

The reason isn't nostalgia for those paperback CYOA books from the 1980s. It's something more fundamental: digital reading is fundamentally different from print reading, and most fiction platforms haven't adapted to that.

Print optimizes for passive consumption. You sit with a book, you follow the author's path. That's fine for long-form literary fiction. But when you're reading on a phone — in 10-minute intervals, on a subway, waiting for coffee — the experience of having agency over the story changes how it feels to read.

Interactive fiction creates what we call narrative investment: readers aren't just following a story, they're participating in it. Retention in interactive fiction is significantly higher than linear serialized fiction. Completion rates on paid interactive series outperform comparable linear series by a wide margin.

This isn't a niche. Wattpad reports that the most-read genres on mobile are romance and fantasy — genres that thrive in interactive formats. The global interactive fiction market has been growing consistently for the past decade. The constraint has always been tooling, not audience appetite.

80% Revenue Share — And Why Most Platforms Can't Offer It

The standard revenue share across fiction publishing platforms looks something like this:

Why can we offer 80% when others offer 50%? Mainly because we're not trying to be all things to all people. We're not building a social network, an app store, and an analytics platform all at once. We handle payments, discovery, and the reading experience — and that's it. Lower overhead means we don't need to take half of what you earn.

There's also a philosophy behind it: we think platforms that take a majority cut from the people doing the creative work have their incentives backwards. We keep 20%. That's enough to build a sustainable business. The other 80% belongs to the people who wrote the story.

The Branching Story Editor

The reason more authors haven't published interactive fiction is tooling. Most interactive fiction tools — Twine, Ink, Ren'Py — are built for game developers, not novelists. The learning curve is steep, and the output doesn't look like something you'd publish commercially.

We built the VelvetChapters editor from scratch with one goal: make it as easy to write a branching story as it is to write a linear one.

How it works

The editor is node-based. Each scene is a card. You write the prose, add the choices at the end of the scene, and connect each choice to the next scene with a line. The visual layout shows you the whole story structure at once — which paths lead where, which endings exist, where the story converges.

For authors with existing stories, we built a JSON import tool. You can paste your story outline into ChatGPT, ask it to format it into our JSON structure, and import it in one click. Many authors have migrated full multi-chapter series in under an hour.

Stories can be as simple or as complex as you want. A romance with two endings. A fantasy epic with six diverging paths and twelve possible conclusions. The editor handles either without breaking a sweat.

Zero Content Restrictions

Every major fiction platform has content policies that evolve over time — and that evolution almost always moves toward restriction. What's allowed today might be flagged tomorrow. This creates a constant low-level anxiety for authors who write in adjacent genres.

VelvetChapters has one content policy: no content that is illegal to publish. That's it. We don't police genre conventions, we don't have a list of prohibited words, we don't evaluate individual scenes for policy compliance. Your story is your story. We're just here to help you sell it.

An Invitation to Early Authors

We're building something worth building: a marketplace where indie authors own their work, keep most of what they earn, and aren't dependent on a company's continued survival to reach their readers.

Right now, we're in early access. If you've been displaced by a platform shutdown, if you're writing interactive fiction and don't have a good home for it, or if you're simply tired of giving away half your earnings to platforms that don't have your interests at heart — we'd like to have you.

Publishing is free. You keep 80%. There's no exclusivity requirement — publish here and anywhere else you want simultaneously. You own everything you write, including the right to take it elsewhere at any time.

What we ask in return is feedback. We're building this with authors, not for them. If something doesn't work, tell us. If a feature would change how you use the platform, tell us. We're small enough that we can actually respond.