For authors
Publish free. Earn when readers slot your work.
ChapterTrail is free to post. Reader Advantage is how serials make money here. A reader subscribes for a handful of slots and chooses which stories to support. Locked chapters stay with those chosen works, instead of sitting in an all-you-can-read pile anyone can scrape through. Each full day your story stays slotted lands on your ledger.
- Publish the story Submit a fiction and keep as much of it free as you want. Readers can find you on the trail before anything is locked.
- Connect payouts, then lock later chapters Stripe holds your bank and tax details. Finish payout setup in Author Studio, then lock chapters for Reader Advantage early access.
- Earn from slotted days When a subscribed reader keeps your fiction in a slot for a full 24 hours, that day’s share of the slot is credited to you. A page load is not what pays.
How the money moves
Each Reader Advantage slot is worth $2 a month. The daily credit is that $2 divided by the number of days in the month, so a day in February is worth a little more than a day in a 31-day month. Partial days do not count.
If a reader leaves a paid slot empty, that day’s value goes into ChapterTrail’s community fund for events and contests. It is not paid out as a direct author allocation.
Qualified reads only unlock the next early-access chapter for that reader. They do not decide whether a slot earns. Credits wait on your ledger, then pay out monthly through Stripe after the hold period. Refunds or disputes in that window come off the ledger.