My Experience with Simily

Simily is a sharing platform where you can share stories for others to read and receive feedback. You still own your work even after posting to Simily. They do not own your work. You can post your work on other platforms or take down from the website whenever you want. On Simily, you can also read stories by other authors.

The positives I have found so far with Simily are: friendly community and you still own your own work. With owning the copy right of your own work, you can leave the website whenever you are dissatisfied or finding a better way to share your work.

With working on the internet, sometimes it gets trying to find a decent space without toxic people. So far I have not seen many overly negative or aggressive writers on Simily. In the few interactions I have had with other writers, it’s been positive. Even in a group on the site designated to ask questions of how things work or other problems, big and small, no one has been highly negative. Even on the occasions where writers wanted more transparency on certain functions, both the website founders and writers involved stayed professional. Unlike other parts of the internet that resort to name calling or worse.

So far my main complaints about Simily is server issues, how pay is tabulated and lack of readers. The server issues and outages as of this post being written have become less though they are still unstable. Some days the servers will not let you log in and it gives you an error. Then other days you can start working on your next story with no interruptions.

As of writing this, Simily has 1000 users. This is great news. I am happy for the team who started Simily that it has grown this far. Though one would think with this many users with accounts and several other thousands of people that visit the site without accounts; authors would have more views. Currently, with one story being published three weeks ago, I have 13 views. Roughly a week of the time span, the servers where rarely stable enough for anyone to do anything.

Maybe the genre I write is not popular. This could be simply the case. With lack of readers, one can not gage properly how popular their work is. If it also isn’t being read by people that like to give feedback, how will a writer know if they are improving? This can go for both new writers or experienced writers trying a new genre or style?

How does one get paid on Simily? By the amount of views your stories have. This doesn’t sound bad but when the servers have hiccups and the site doesn’t have a huge reader base, it gets tricky. Why? You only get paid two cents a view. A writer also has to wait for the minimum of 10$ before having it transferred to your PayPal account. If you do the math, you need 500 views over all of your stories posted in order to get paid. I’m unsure how this is ‘new writer friendly’ like it claims when, at the moment, the site really doesn’t have a huge reader base.

With a free account, you get five story reads in a month. I am coming up on the reset soon. I was told by an email that free accounts don’t get this reset until they fix a paywall problem. Yes they did give me a promotion code to get unlimited reads for one month. After this free trial, it costs six dollars. I don’t see enough being fixed or this to be profitable enough in views to give them any money. Of course, that is just my two sense.

So far, I feel like this site has promise. Though if you want pay for your work, immediately, I would suggest against this site for that. If you are looking for a community of some positive writers that can give some advice, this is a good starting point. There are many groups you can chat with other writers for a good community feeling. If the marketing for the site gets better, it has promise.