Pitch
Why Tales?
- Writing: Tales is optimized for writing. No need to animate characters on our platform; focus on cranking out chapters for your fans.
- Asset Library: Access an incredible library of backgrounds, characters, fx, and fonts to visualize key story moments. Request an asset if we don’t have one!
- Interactivity: Our technology allows you to create complex gameplay if you decide to incorporate it into your story.Add choices, track key decisions, and branch the storyline.
- Data: See which episodes are getting views and monetization. See exactly where your readers are falling off and tighten up the story to increase your conversion rates.
- Iterate: Update your story at any time. Let the community provide you data on how to improve your stories instead of relying on an “expert”.
- Maintain Rights: You’ll retain all of your rights on the Tales platform.
- Earn Income: Our demographic is 18-34 females with high disposable income. Make royalties every time someone reads your story! You’ll earn 35% of net revenue royalties once basic costs are recouped. More payment details are here.
- Streaming: Our demographic/content profile is exactly what Netflix/HBO/etc are looking for when greenlighting new streaming series.
Pitch
Four Upgrade Levels
- Minimum: Import your entire story to the Tales platform without changing a thing. You’ll gain tap by tap analytics on each chapter and find out the exact paragraph your readers are dropping off. Receive royalties on each chapter read; up to 3x Kindle Unlimited.
- Immersive: Add visuals and audio from our asset library to create an immersive story. Our data shows our immersive format enjoys a 25% improvement over plain text.
- Premium Content: Add optional director’s cut content to improve monetization by 3x. Let your superfans unlock character backstories, read the story from another character’s point of view, clues to future plot twists, and steamier scenes.
- Branching Storylines: Create branching storylines and make a full-on game out of your story. This is the most challenging path to take but also the most rewarding when it’s done well. This will take 3x longer than a largely linear story.
Pitch
Formats
The Tales technology is incredibly flexible in allowing you to mix unlimited visuals and audio with your text. However, you do have to pick a format that is optimized for either Prose or Dialogue. Prose format provides the reader with more reading room whereas Dialogue format reserves space for where character portraits appear. Below are the quick benefits of each format:
Prose (Book)
- Building fantastic worlds that can be hard to visualize (sci-fi, fantasy), and require deep explanation.
- Providing the player information the player doesn’t have access to (e.g. Creating deep character development, internal monologue).
- Simpler: The author doesn’t have to deal with character stage directions (e.g. entering characters and emotions).
Dialogue (Screenplay)
- Best for dialogue-heavy stories with multiple cast members.
- This is the format with the most work, but if done well has great potential as it weaves all asset types with dialogue and prose.
- We find screenwriters are a natural fit given their focus on character dialogue.
Pitch
Asset Types
We have thousands of assets in our library ready for you to use. Here’s a taste:
Text Styles
Style the look and animations of your text. Hundreds of styles in our library.
Backgrounds
Nuclear wastelands, fairytale castles, historical cities: our backgrounds library provides backgrounds for any situation!
Characters
Our characters cover a diverse spread of ages, body types, skin colors, and looks: everyone and anyone can be the star of your story! If you can dream it, we can do it!
Icons
Gameplay is easier to understand when there’s a visual cue! Our library of icons will help communicate your intent to players.
- Add icons on locked choices to clearly communicate what the player is missing.
- Use Icon Doobers to directly confirm a player’s choice.
- Use Results and Summaries to celebrate moments of gameplay success.
Objects
Individual items presented without a background, best used for clues, symbols, and things that the player “picks up” and potentially hold in inventory.
Story Moments
For stories that perform in the top 20% on the platform, we also offer special hand-painted images. These are perfect to show off a special moment, an action scene, or a monster.
Visuals & Sound FX
You’ll have access to sound effects to set a mood. We also have an extensive visual effect library for transitions and actions.
Pitch
Interactivity
One of the most exciting features on our platform is how we allow writers to add interactivity to any story. If you decide to add it, consider:
Your choices can be gated by variables/inventory:
- Why should your story be interactive instead of linear?
- Your stories should be built to give the player a sense of roleplay or agency in a world.
- Choices should matter but still provide for multi-episode presentation.
- Usually players start and end the episodes in the same physical location (“Transition Points”) but the path to these can vary wildly.
- The latter episodes of the story can break this guideline completely as the story should be branching to completely different endings based on the cumulative effective of previous decisions.
Variables
In order to track a player behavior and decisions, we use a system called “variables.” Your story can persistently track things like:- Levels: External collections such as XP, money, trust, or information.
- Traits: Internal attributes such as dexterity, intelligence.
- Relationships: How much they are liked/disliked per person.
- Currency: Spend currency to acquire items or make choices.
- Inventory Items: Allow players to collect items and unlock options based on what is in inventory.
Choices
Your choices can let players fundamentally change the outcome of the story.- We allow infinite levels of choice nesting.
- You’ll be able to give the player invisible flags and reference them in later episodes.
- These can be used to influence dialogue or invisibly navigate them into customized branches.
Your choices can be gated by variables/inventory:
- The player must have 8 clues to approach the police.
- The player must have 17 strength to lift the boulder.
- The player is “liked” by Jenna, but must be “loved” to convince her to go to the prom.
Gameplay
You now have access to a very robust set of tools! You can:
- Show variables to the player with a variety of visibility options.
- Take away variables whenever you like.
- Set up random calculations, and use math.
- Gate choices based on variable requirements.
Have a game design idea and want help coding? Just ask your content manager for help!
Comparison
Show your player a summary of their actions!
- Their playstyle
- Key decisions they made
- How much they improved their stats or relationships with other characters.
Gender pronouns
No need to create totally separate branches if your love interest is a male or a female! You can write one branch and just swap out assets and gender pronouns.The dialogue line from the video? It’s as simple as this: Oh, I love {LOVE.him}. Isn’t {LOVE.he} lovely?
Pitch
Publishing Criteria
Genres & Demographics
- Our audience generally likes reading so it skews female (70/30).
- Our audience is on the younger side with heavy concentration between 18-35.
- We believe strong characters, gripping plots, and great gameplay can have universal appeal; avoid cliched approaches to writing for your audience.
- Your story should be written for an adult audience (18+) who isn’t afraid of complexity, mature issues, and genuine portrayals of things like humor, romance, violence, and sorrow. While we think it’s great to mix in comedy, we haven’t seen a breakout hit from stories that focused solely on Comedy, Children, Dramedy, and other light-hearted topics. This will hopefully change over time as we increase our readership.
- Your content must fall within the content policies of our platform.
Be Unique
We prefer writers to work on unique ideas that speak to them rather than hand them templates to color between the lines on. We’ll be reading between the lines to understand:- What makes this story, characters or world interesting?
- Does this fit best on the Tales platform vs somewhere else?
Common Patterns
These are some of the techniques we’ve seen in our best stories:- Fast-paced openings that get to the hook fast
- Minimal exposition or description
- Heavy emphasis on dialogue and character interaction
- Frequent interaction points
Structure
We love stories of all structures including:- Epic stories with massive casts that can sustain for multiple seasons.
- Mini-series with a unique perspective.
- Highly replayable, twine-like games with combinatorial outcomes.
Confidentiality
While we don’t sign NDAs before green-lighting pitches, we take privacy very seriously. We believe the best stories thrive when they remain in the hands of the creators. We’re honored to be trusted with over 1,000 projects from veteran writers hailing from TellTale, BioWare, Pixelberry, PocketGems, Choice of Games, Ubisoft, EA, Radish, Wattpad, Hooked, and more. As a platform, our number one metric is your financial and artistic success.Pitch
Submit a Pitch
We’re building the platform to democratize publishing but in the short-term we’re prioritizing projects that our platform can bring to life in high quality. Submit your pitch below!
Pitch