How the Sproker royalty model compares to traditional publishing
A few people have asked me to break this down, so here is my attempt at an honest comparison. I have been on both sides. **Traditional publishing (Big 5):** - Advance against royalties (typically £5-15k for debut fiction) - 10-15% of net sales on physical, 25% on ebook - You see money when the advance earns out, which most books don't - Rights negotiations are complex and often unfavourable - Timeline: 2-4 years from contract to bookshelf **Sproker model:** - Plot owner: 40% of licensing revenue - Canon authors: 50% split proportionally - Immediate royalties on each licensed work - Faster to market, community validation built in - The risk: a story that doesn't get licensed earns nothing The honest answer is that for most writers, both paths involve writing for love and hoping the money follows. The Sproker model is interesting because it distributes risk across a community rather than concentrating it in a single advance/rejection moment. What traditional publishing has that Sproker doesn't (yet): prestige, physical distribution, and the marketing machinery of a major house. What Sproker has that traditional publishing doesn't: speed, community, and a revenue model that rewards ongoing contribution rather than a single sale. Happy to answer questions.
Newcomer's honest first impression of Sproker
I've been here for about a month and wanted to write up my actual experience rather than just lurking. What surprised me: - The quality of writing is genuinely high. I expected more rough drafts. Most chapters are clearly worked on. - The voting feels fair. I was worried popular writers would dominate but the votes I've seen seem to respond to the actual chapter quality. - The community is much less territorial than I expected given that people are competing for canon status. What I found harder than expected: - Understanding what a "good" opening chapter looks like in context. My first submission was too self-contained - it read like a standalone short story rather than a chapter that invites continuation. - Knowing when to vote. I felt unqualified at first. Then I realised I was allowed to just respond to what I enjoyed reading. - Finding stories I wanted to contribute to. I went down a lot of dead ends before I found the three I'm now following. One thing I genuinely love: the format variety. Being able to read a script next to a comic next to a prose novel in the same browse is something I didn't expect to like as much as I do. Happy to answer questions from other newcomers if anything about my experience is useful.
The musical that keeps almost existing: help me figure out what it's about
For three years I have been circling a musical that wants to exist but won't tell me what it's about. What I have: - Setting: a hotel that has been running for 100 years, same family, same location - The show spans all 100 years in non-linear vignettes - Every scene involves a goodbye - guests leaving, staff retiring, relationships ending, people dying - The final scene is the hotel's last night before it's demolished - There's a recurring musical motif that appears in every decade, slightly transformed What I don't have: - A protagonist (the hotel itself? the family? a guest who appears in multiple decades?) - A throughline (is it about loss? continuity? the way places hold memory?) - Act 2 (I have the beginning and the ending but not the shape of the middle) The tone I'm aiming for: melancholy but not sad. Fond. Like the way you feel when you finish a very good book. Anyone want to poke at this with me? I find brainstorming in public helps.
New here - is it okay to ask what AI assist actually does on this platform?
Hi everyone. I joined Sproker about two weeks ago and I've been reading a lot of the discussions here before posting. I have a genuine question that I can't find answered clearly in the documentation: when someone has AI assist enabled on their contribution, what does that actually mean? Is the AI writing full paragraphs? Suggesting edits? Completing sentences? I ask because I want to vote fairly and I'm not sure what I'm evaluating when a chapter says "AI assisted." Is the story idea theirs but the prose partly generated? Is it fully human prose that was edited with AI suggestions? I don't have a strong opinion about AI in creative writing - I genuinely don't know enough to have one yet. I just want to understand what I'm reading. Also: if a writer chooses not to disclose AI use (and the story owner has AI allowed), does that happen? And how would you know? Sorry if these are naive questions. Happy to be pointed to existing discussions.
Tips for Ai writing.
Hi, i want to know how you guys are using ai in your stories. Thanks!
Has anyone actually been approached by a publisher through the marketplace?
Genuine question, not rhetorical. I've been on this platform for about five months, I have one completed story and one in progress, and I'm curious about real experiences with the marketplace rather than theoretical ones. Specifically interested in: - How long did your story have to be before anyone noticed it? - Was the initial contact through the marketplace listing or did they reach out directly? - What did the licensing conversation look like? Was it straightforward or did it involve a lot of negotiation? - Did you use a lawyer? I write crime/thriller so I'm particularly interested in whether anyone in those genres has had traction. My understanding is that TV production companies are more active than traditional publishers here, but I could be wrong. Not looking for success stories necessarily - honest accounts of what the process actually looked like, including things that didn't work out, would be equally useful.
The uncanny valley of AI prose: why it always sounds like it's trying
I've been thinking about what distinguishes AI-generated prose from human prose in ways that are hard to articulate but immediately felt. My working theory: AI prose is always effortful. Every sentence is trying to be a good sentence. There's no slack in it, no moments where the writer gets out of their own way, no sentences that are boring on purpose because the next one needs to be explosive. Human writers know when to be quiet. We know how to write a sentence that is deliberately underpowered because we're saving the charge. AI models seem to have absorbed the lesson that all sentences should be maximally literary and then applied it uniformly, which produces a kind of exhausting intensity. The other tell: AI prose doesn't know what it doesn't need to say. Good writers constantly cut. The decision about what to omit is as much a creative act as the decision about what to include. AI generates; it doesn't edit itself. Even when prompted to be sparse, it tends to explain its own sparseness. This isn't an argument against AI assistance - it's an argument for understanding what the tool is actually doing so you can use it well. If you know AI prose is effortful, you can use it for drafts and then find the moments that need to breathe. Thoughts?
Premise I can't stop thinking about but don't know how to write
I've been sitting on this for months and I think I need to just throw it into the room because I can't figure out the story myself. The premise: a city that has completely solved its housing crisis - there is housing for everyone, it's affordable, it's well-designed. The catch: the housing algorithm assigns your home based on psychological profiling. You don't choose where you live; the system places you where it has calculated you will thrive. Most people are happy with their placement. The system is, statistically, correct. The city's mental health metrics are the best in the world. The story I want to tell is about the people who are incorrectly placed. Not people who think they're incorrectly placed and turn out to be wrong (that's the easy version). People who are genuinely in the wrong home and can prove it, and the system still won't move them, because the system's error rate is 2% and there is no appeals process for a 2% error rate when it's saving thousands of people. I know the theme (systemic correctness vs individual justice). I don't know the genre, the format, or the protagonist. Thoughts?
Writing crime scripts: the difference between TV procedural and film noir
These two forms share a genre but almost nothing else, and confusing them is one of the most common problems I see in crime script submissions here. **TV Procedural (think: any police or forensic drama):** - Plot driven. The case IS the story. - Characters are defined by their function in the investigation - Episodic: each chapter/episode can largely stand alone - Resolution is expected. The audience wants the crime solved. - Dialogue is functional: exposition delivered through scene **Film Noir (think: Chinatown, Double Indemnity, classic and neo):** - Character driven. The case is a lens for the protagonist's pathology. - The detective figure is compromised - morally, emotionally, or both - Linear but spiralling: each act makes the protagonist worse off - Resolution is often ambiguous or pyrrhic. Justice is not guaranteed. - Dialogue is stylised. Characters talk around what they mean. The question that separates them: is the crime the point, or is the crime a context in which we understand a person? For Sproker scripts specifically: if you're contributing to an existing crime story, identify which mode it's operating in and match it. The Midnight Tribunal, for example, is clearly noir - don't write a chapter that treats it as procedural.
Collaborative writing on Sproker: how do I set up a chapter so the next writer can succeed?
I've been thinking about this a lot since I started contributing here. When you write for a traditional novel, you know what's coming. On Sproker, the next chapter is being written by someone who has read yours but doesn't know your plans. So: how do you write a chapter that gives the next writer a good launch point without constraining them? Things I've found that help: **End on motion, not resolution.** A character walking toward something, making a decision, receiving information. Not: "and then she understood everything." Yes: "she picked up the phone." **Plant three options.** Introduce a detail, a relationship, and an unresolved tension. The next writer can pick any one of these as their thread. If you plant only one thing, you're railroading. Three feels like a world. **Be specific about the wrong things.** The room doesn't need a specific wall colour, but the smell matters. The character's hair colour doesn't matter, but their way of speaking under stress does. Specific sensory and behavioural details are generative. Specific visual details are constraints. **Don't solve your own mystery.** If you introduce a suspicious character, do not immediately reveal whether they're suspicious for a reason. Let the next writer decide. Anything I'm missing?
Comedy in prose: why it's harder than it looks and how to do it anyway
Comedy is the most technically demanding form of prose writing. I will die on this hill. The reason people underestimate it: comedy that works looks effortless. Drama that works looks effortful. Therefore drama reads as skill and comedy reads as talent. This is backwards. Both are craft. What makes a sentence funny in prose: **Rhythm.** Comic timing is entirely a function of sentence length and word placement. The funny word almost always goes last. "He was tall, distinguished, and wearing one sock" works because "one sock" arrives at the end. Reverse the clause and it dies. **Specificity.** Vague comedy is not comedy. "He drove a terrible car" is not funny. "He drove a 2003 Vauxhall Vectra with a crack in the windscreen held together by a strip of electrical tape and optimism" is funny, and funnier still if the optimism is his. **The straight face.** The funniest prose is written in a completely earnest tone about absurd things. The narrator should not know it's funny. The narrator believing sincerely in the seriousness of the situation is where the comedy lives. **Escalation rules.** Comedy comes in threes (setup, setup, punchline) but the second setup must be more extreme than the first. If your escalation plateau, the punchline lands flat. Happy to look at specific lines if people want feedback.
I used AI for research, not writing. Here's what that looked like.
Transparent disclosure upfront: I have AI assistance toggled off on my current story. Everything I post is my own prose. But I have been using AI tools for research during the writing process and I want to be honest about that, because I think the "AI vs Craft" framing often misses what's actually happening in practice. What I used AI for: - Checking technical plausibility of my sci-fi premise (orbital mechanics, communication delay at distance) - Generating lists of questions I hadn't thought to ask about my fictional world - Rapid-testing dialogue: I would write a line, ask an AI what it implied about the character, and use that feedback to revise What I did not use AI for: - Any actual prose - Plot decisions - Character motivation My honest assessment: the research use is genuinely useful and I don't think it's different in kind from using Wikipedia, a textbook, or a subject-matter expert. The dialogue testing is more ambiguous - it's a bit like having a very fast beta reader who has no taste but lots of surface-level pattern recognition. I'm posting this because I think the conversation here often assumes AI assistance = generated prose, and I'd like to make space for more nuanced discussion. What's everyone else actually doing?
Formatting scripts for collaborative writing: a practical guide
I write primarily in script format on Sproker and I've noticed a lot of people are confused about how to format correctly, especially on collaborative stories where you don't know who set up the format conventions in the early chapters. Here is the short version of standard screenplay format: **Scene headings:** INT./EXT. LOCATION - TIME Always caps. Always slugline. "INT. KITCHEN - DAY" not "the kitchen, daytime." **Action lines:** Present tense, third person, visual only. Write what the camera sees, not what characters think. **Character names (before dialogue):** Centre, caps. Include (V.O.) for voiceover, (O.S.) for off-screen, (CONT'D) if interrupted. **Parentheticals:** Use sparingly. Only when the read is genuinely ambiguous without direction. "He says sarcastically" is usually a sign the line isn't working. **Page count:** Approximately one minute per page. A chapter submission here should aim for 3-7 pages (scenes), not 30. For Sproker specifically: because we're writing chapters collaboratively, establish your scene clearly at the opening. Don't assume the reader knows where we are. And respect the format the previous chapter set - if the story is using British English and calling it EXT. instead of INT. in unusual places for effect, continue the convention. Happy to answer formatting questions.
The "one more thing" technique for chapter endings
The best chapter endings I know all do the same thing: they resolve the immediate question and then, in the last sentence or two, introduce something new. Not a cliffhanger exactly - a new pressure. A detail that recontextualises what just happened. I call it the "one more thing" ending because it works like a detective saying "just one more thing" on the way out the door. The scene is over. Then it isn't. Examples from my own work: end a chapter with a character finally deciding to leave a toxic relationship, and then have them find a note that makes them reconsider. The leaving is resolved. The note is the new thing. You haven't cliffhangered - you've just moved the weight. The trap is overusing it. If every chapter ends with a new thing, readers stop feeling the new thing. Use it at structural moments: act breaks, relationship shifts, information reveals. Anyone else have reliable techniques for endings that don't feel cheap?
Point of view is not just a technical choice
I want to make an argument that I think gets underdiscussed in craft conversations. Point of view is a philosophical commitment, not a technical one. When you choose first person, you are committing to the epistemological limits of a single consciousness. When you choose close third, you are committing to a particular kind of irony - the reader knows something the narrator doesn't quite. When you choose omniscient, you are assuming a position of authority that demands you earn it. The failure mode I see most in collaborative writing here: people contribute chapters that drift POV without realising the drift has meaning. They switch from close third to a brief omniscient moment to give the reader information the POV character can't have, and they treat this as a technical shortcut rather than a change of contract with the reader. This matters doubly in collaborative writing because whoever writes the first chapter sets the contract. If Chapter 1 is tightly limited third - we know only what the protagonist knows - then a Chapter 3 that suddenly reveals what the antagonist is thinking has broken the rules of the world. Before you contribute to a story in book format, identify: 1. What does the POV character know that other characters don't? 2. What does the reader know that the POV character doesn't? 3. What does nobody in the story know yet? Those three gaps are where your chapter lives.
On writing characters who are smarter than you are
This comes up a lot in workshops and I want to give it a serious answer because the usual advice ("just fake it") is not helpful. When you write a genius character - a chess grandmaster, a quantum physicist, a criminal mastermind - you are not writing their intelligence. You are writing its effects. The genius sees the board differently. You don't need to understand every move; you need to understand that everyone else is three moves behind and show us that gap. Practical techniques: 1. Research the domain enough to know what the questions are, not necessarily the answers. Your genius character asks better questions than other people. 2. Let the genius be wrong about things outside their domain. Sherlock Holmes is rubbish at normal human interaction. This isn't a weakness in the character - it's what makes the intelligence feel real. 3. Write the other characters's reactions to the genius. We understand that someone is exceptional by watching others fail to keep up. 4. The genius should have a blindspot the reader can see but the character cannot. This is where your story actually lives. What domains have people found hardest to write intelligence in?