Our Approach

This page is for the authors and readers who want to know more than the front-door pitch. It's about how Plot Foundry — the small studio that makes Scribi and Readerling — is structured, how it's funded, and what we're trying to avoid. It's longer than the Why Readerling page. You're here because you want the details, so I'll give you the details.

Who is "we"

Right now, Plot Foundry is one person. I'm Brian Palmer. I write fiction under the pen names Simon Strange, B.C. Palmer, and Brian C. Palmer. I built Scribi over about seven years, mostly in evenings and weekends and the occasional sabbatical from my own writing. I built Readerling on top of the same infrastructure because the more I worked on Scribi, the more obvious it became that the writing problem and the reader-connection problem were the same problem with two faces.

I live in Oregon with my husband and our dogs. I have ADHD and a hyperfocus problem, which is sometimes a feature and sometimes a bug. I am not a tech bro. I do not own a hoodie with a logo on it. I came to development late, after years of writing, because nobody else was going to build the thing I needed.

The studio is not venture-funded. There are no investors. There is no exit strategy. There is no plan to sell either platform to a larger company.

This is a values position. It's also a practical one. The practical part is what makes the values part durable. The moment you take VC money, you owe someone a return. The cleanest way to deliver returns in a platform like this is to monetize aggressively — sell data, run ads, prioritize growth over user experience, optimize for engagement metrics that look good in a board deck. Those incentives are what turned every promising author/reader platform — and most major social media platforms — into one of three outcomes: neglected communities, abusive cultures, or platforms acquired and quietly changed for the worse to hit a number for investors. I'd rather build something smaller that stays itself than something bigger that doesn't.

How the money works

Scribi is a paid product. It has a one-time license fee and an optional cloud subscription for sync, backup, and a few features that require infrastructure on our end. Most of the margin from Scribi sales goes toward keeping the lights on and continuing to develop both platforms.

Readerling is free, both for authors and for readers. There are no ads on it. We don't sell data. We don't take a cut from authors' book sales because at launch there are no book sales — Readerling links out to wherever the author already sells their books (Amazon, Kobo, Apple, their own site, whatever).

If we eventually add direct book sales — and I'd like to — the goal is a ninety-ten split. Author keeps ninety percent, platform takes ten to cover payment processing and operating costs. This is not a competitive flex against Amazon's KDP rates; it's just the math that lets the platform sustain itself without taking more than its share.

We may use affiliate links where they're appropriate. If a reader clicks through to Amazon to buy your book, we might earn a small affiliate commission on that purchase. That commission comes out of Amazon's pocket, not yours. We'll be transparent about where this happens.

That's the entire revenue model. Scribi licenses, optional cloud subscriptions, affiliate links, and eventually a small cut of direct sales if that ever happens. No ads. No data sales. No "premium author" tiers that pay for visibility. No promoted posts.

Why this matters

The reason I'm laying this out in detail is that most platforms in this space have made themselves untrustworthy by following a predictable script:

They start out idealistic. They build something genuinely useful. They take investment to scale faster. The investors want returns. The platform pivots toward whatever generates the most revenue per user. The user experience erodes. The community starts to notice. The platform doubles down on growth metrics to compensate. The community gives up and goes somewhere else. The cycle repeats with the next platform.

The platforms in our space that once felt most useful are now either neglected properties of larger companies that authors and readers tolerate because nothing better exists, or platforms that were acquired and quietly redirected toward whatever generated returns for the new owners. Most social platforms eventually follow some version of that arc. The pattern isn't a moral failing of any individual founder; it's what happens when the structural incentives push everyone in the same direction.

Plot Foundry is structured to not be subject to those incentives. I don't have investors to answer to. I don't have a board demanding quarterly growth. I don't have an exit timeline. My income comes primarily from writing — Plot Foundry doesn't need to make me rich, it needs to be sustainable. Those are very different targets, and they pull the platform in very different directions.

This doesn't mean Plot Foundry won't change. It will. It needs to. But the changes will be in service of making the platforms more useful, not in service of extracting more value from the people who use them.

Why Scribi gates access to Readerling

If you read the Why Readerling page, you've already seen the short version of this. Here's the longer version.

There are three reasons access to Readerling is gated through Scribi.

The first is funding. Readerling is expensive to run and produces no direct revenue. Scribi licenses and cloud subscriptions are what keep both platforms operating. If Readerling were available to anyone with an email address, the operating costs would balloon and there would be no corresponding revenue to offset them. The math of a free, ad-free, data-respecting platform only works when there's something underneath it that pays the bills. Scribi is that something.

The second is platform integrity. A free, open-signup author platform is an obvious target for abuse. Fake pen names. Impersonators. Automated AI-generated content. Spam accounts at scale. Every author-facing platform that has launched without friction has been overwhelmed by these problems, usually within months. Requiring a Scribi license — which involves a real purchase, identifying information, and a clear paper trail — raises the cost of abuse considerably. It doesn't eliminate it. But it makes the platform a much harder target than the alternatives.

The third is what the gate signals. Readerling is for working authors. Not exclusively published authors, not exclusively successful authors, but people who are serious enough about their writing to invest in a real tool for it. As Readerling grows reader-side features, that signal matters more, not less. Readers should be able to trust that the authors they find here are who they say they are and that they actually write. The Scribi gate is part of how that promise gets kept.

I know this is going to bother some authors. There are writers with established workflows in Scrivener or Word or Google Docs who don't want to switch tools just to access a reader-facing platform. That's a fair frustration. My honest response is: I don't have an alternative to offer right now. The platform isn't big enough or stable enough to support open author registration without compromising the things that make it worth using. When it is, we'll revisit. Until then, this is the trade-off.

I've tried to make Scribi worth using on its own merits. It's flexible, modular, and doesn't force any decisions about how you write. If it turns out to be useful to you, the Readerling gate becomes a non-issue. If it isn't useful to you, you may be right to skip the whole thing for now. I'm not going to pretend Scribi is for everyone, and I'm not going to pretend the bundle isn't a bundle.

What we won't do

Some explicit commitments, because they're easier to make in writing than to walk back later.

We will not sell user data. Not aggregated, not anonymized, not in bulk, not at all. The reader data that exists on Readerling is for the authors readers chose to follow and for the platform's own operations. Nothing else.

We will not run ads on Readerling. Authors promoting their own books is not advertising — it's the entire point of the platform. Third-party advertising is not on the roadmap and won't be added.

We will not algorithmically prioritize content for engagement. The feed is chronological. It will remain chronological. If we ever change this, it will be discussed publicly first, and it will not be in service of making the feed more "sticky."

We will not introduce paid-priority tiers. No "promoted post" feature for authors who pay extra. No paid algorithmic boost. The reach of any given post is determined by who has chosen to follow that author, full stop.

We will not chase scale at the expense of the experience. If growing faster means making the platform worse, we won't grow faster. This sometimes means saying no to features that would attract more users; it always means saying no to features that would degrade what's already here.

We will not pretend to be something we're not. Plot Foundry is a small operation. It will probably remain a small operation for a long time. When something breaks, I'll tell you it broke. When I make a decision that won't be popular, I'll explain why. When I'm wrong, I'll fix it.

What's actually new here

I want to be honest about something: none of these commitments are technically novel. Every platform makes promises like these at the start. Most break them eventually, usually around the time they take their first major investment round.

The thing that's different here isn't the promises. It's the structure. Plot Foundry doesn't have investors who could pressure a pivot. It doesn't have an exit timeline that creates incentives to extract value. It doesn't have a growth team measured on engagement metrics. The structural reasons most platforms become untrustworthy don't apply.

That doesn't mean nothing could go wrong. I could lose interest. I could get hit by a bus. I could make bad decisions. But the failure modes that come from those things are different from the failure modes that come from chasing investor returns. They're slower, smaller, more recoverable.

If at some point Plot Foundry needs to take outside investment to keep operating, I'll discuss it with the user community before doing it. If at some point the platform stops being financially sustainable as-is, I'll discuss that too. The principle isn't that nothing will ever change. It's that changes happen in the open and in service of the people who use the platform, not against them.

How to reach me

If something on this page concerns you, or if you've spotted a contradiction between what I've said here and what the platform is actually doing, write to me directly. I read everything.

I won't always respond quickly — I'm one person and I have books to write too — but I do respond. This is the kind of thing where the user community has earned the right to ask hard questions, and I've earned the obligation to answer them.

admin@plotfoundry.com