Inkitt and Why I’m Not Publishing With Them

I ran a test this past summer in regards to Inkitt. For those of you who don’t know or haven’t heard of Inkitt I’ll explain a little.

Inkitt is a publishing platform where writers can post their stories a chapter at a time and could get a publishing contract offered for said story. Writers are not paid for uploading their stories. Money only comes in if a story is offered a publishing contract. There are also writing contests on the site that offer publishing contracts.

Again, the writer posts their fiction up for free.

So over the summer Inkitt ran a special where they did in fact offer $15 for each story over 30k words posted to the site. It only lasted a few weeks and I only found out about it because I was signed up for a newsletter somewhere, but I was a little hard up for money at the time and thought why not. Digging through some old stories I found two that I wrote years ago. I did a brief polish (yep, I cried a few times when I realized how badly I wrote at that point in my life), and set up a basic cover image.

The stories were uploaded and off we went. I confirmed with the staff that I had uploaded the stories for the promotion and was promised to be paid in a week or two. Payment never arrived. I haven’t uploaded another story.

Beyond that, I have kept my eye on the site to see reading stats and whatnot. To date there have been about 150 reads to the stories. That seems kind of impressive but deeply disheartening. There have been no reviews or anything else. No feed back from staff. Nothing. Normally I would see this as a type of off the cuff site where writers share their work, but this site says they want to publish.

In the publishing and writing world feed back is vital. How else does a writer improve without it?

So, I’ll not be posting any stories on Inkitt in the future. I will keep the stories there for now, but I have plans to revamp them and self-publish them at a later date.

Peace and Love!