Chris Bissette

My First Two Weeks on Koala Quill

Two weeks ago I saw a post on Reddit with the title “I’m building a writing platform that pays $0.25 per read”. I’ll admit that initally I was skeptical. I’m always put off by sales pitches anyway, and the content of that post sounded very sales-y. But the creator seemed fairly responsive in the comments (rather than it just being a piece of drive-by marketing), and I was in the process of rebuilding my writing routine after a long period of ill health that’s seen it fall apart, so I figured why not give it a go.

I’ve now been using it daily for 12 days. My stats say that I’ve written 28k words since joining. I have 16inmywallet(14 of which is currently committed to “Guilds”), and I haven’t put any of my own money in.

I’m unsure how I’m feeling about it. It’s undeniable that seeing the numbers go up every day has made it more appealing to me to sit down and write. The progress bars and the little pop-up saying “you just earned $X!” tickle the reward centres of my ADHD brain, and that’s a good thing. But I’m aware that I’m only earning money through my actual writing because I’m still part of the free trial, and that once that goes away the drip of money will go away, too. (And I’m undecided as to whether I feel this is worth a monthly subscription to keep earning a tiny bit of money purely from typing, because that would mean me cancelling a different monthly subscription to make room for it in my budget).

The claim of “$0.25 per read” is something I haven’t seen proof of yet, and I think that’s entirely down to a small userbase. People aren’t here to read, they’re here to write, and discoverability of the things people publish to the site is fairly non-existent. At the time of writing this my most ‘popular’ post has a grand total of 3 views, and none of them have earned any money (presumably because the reader didn’t read far enough to be served an ad). Maybe this will change as the site grows.

There’s also the fact that you can only monetise posts in which you’ve spent 20 minutes actively typing. I have mixed thoughts about this. Writing and typing are not the same thing, and sometimes - often - the writing process does require you to sit and think without touching the keyboard. So to equate ‘typing time’ to ‘writing time’ seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how writing works. But, at the same time, we’re talking about money here, and the explicit aim of the site is “to keep quality high and prevent […] drive-by posts [and] AI-generated fluff”. So I understand that I line has to be drawn somewhere, and that that line will always be arbitrary. I can’t help feeling, though, that it penalises people who write succintly and who type quickly. (Here’s an example: I finished this post, which is around 1,000 words long, to find that it only contained 15 minutes of active typing. There’s a very strong temptation to spend 5 minutes typing nonsense into the editor just to allow me to monetise it. I guess this is the time to find out whether editing the thing counts towards active typing time.)

I’m also a little confused about how the Guilds work. The way they’re advertised is this: You pay a certain amount of money from your wallet to join a Guild. Each Guild lasts for a fixed amount of time, and your pledge is sort of like a bet with yourself that you’ll turn up every day and write for X minutes while the Guild is running. If you fail, you forfeit your money. Everyone who succeeds gets the prize pot split between them, minus a small platform fee.

That seems simple in theory. In practice, the one Guild that I’ve joined paid out exactly the amount of money that I’d put in to it, despite me being able to see that a number of people didn’t complete it. There’s a little bit of strangeness about how the prize pools are calculated, too. In theory the Prize Pool should be equal to the number of people in the Guild multiplied by the deposit they paid to join it, but one of my Guilds with a $3 deposit has 101 members and a Prize Pool of just $124. I wonder if both of these things area result of this being a “starter” Guild being used to demonstrate how things actually work, and therefore the pledges are being subsidised by the site’s creator - in which case it seems fair that he’s not going to pay the people who showed up out of his own pocket as a result of people who signed up, joined a Guild, and then never came back. I’d like to see more transparency about that, though. I have another Guild that’s due a payout in the next 24 hours, so I guess I’ll see at that point whether I “earn” more than I put in or not.

I’m also not using it to work on anything ‘real’ at this point. I’m doing my warm-ups here and writing blog posts using the editor, but in order to start using it to write anything meaningful I’d need to see a much more in-depth set of terms and conditions and a privacy policy. I’ve asked the creator about this on Reddit and he assured me that he’s not claiming any rights other than the right to display work that you choose to publish, but I’d like to see some actual legal text about that. I’d also like to see the ability to delete your account and all the data.

But I can’t deny that it’s got me writing. The ability to find a “quillmate” to write with, and to see their time spent writing alongside yours, has a similar effect to body doubling, which is something that I’ve always found useful. And as I said, ‘numbers go up’ is always a good motivating force for me. I’ll admit that I’m still a little skeptical about the financial side of the platform, and I’ve spotted a few technical bugs, but it’s very quickly become a part of my writing routine and I’m happy about that.

There’s a very short list of things I’d like to see that would improve the platform (for me, at least):

I’m interested to see how the platform develops, and if you’re struggling to sit down and write every day I think it might be worth giving it a chance. I wouldn’t go into it expecting to make any money, but then that’s just good advice for being a writer in general (ask me how much I earned last year as a full-time writer with no other job). As it is, I’m going to stick with it for another couple of weeks and see what happens.

#blog #writing