Five Weeks on Simily

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

What it’s like to be on a new, slow-growing writing platform

I joined Simily a few weeks ago after reading articles by Kristina God and Burk. At the time, I pledged to tell the tale of my experience on the platform.

Four Weeks on Simily

My plan was to use the platform as my home for some short fiction. I like the idea of a fiction first platform. Simily started out as a home for fiction, but they now allow nonfiction posts. I’m not a big fan of the Medium writers who simply copy their nonfiction work, post it on Simily, and leave. I like the idea of posting fiction and getting feedback. Just like here on Medium where I post pieces and work for engagement with other writers. That said, there is a fair amount of fiction on the platform.

Here’s one of my fiction pieces if you’d like to see what I post there:

Birds of Pray - Simily

When I joined the platform, I knew it was relatively small. It’s new, after all, and the interface is not exactly technically spectacular. Still, I was hopeful that there would be advantages to “getting in on the ground floor.” The promised pay of $20/1000 views sounded decent, too.

So far, I’ve earned just under $2.00. That’s with four stories published and five weeks of presence on Simily. I’ve gotten some interesting and helpful feedback on my stories and I’ve read some pretty good stories, too.

As of today, Simily has just over 2800 users. That’s not a lot. I’ve noticed that what seemed like some pretty rapid growth has slowed down, too. I suspect a number of writers are put off by some of the technical issues — the site can load slowly at times, and it has been down a few times in the past few weeks. However, with some technical improvements, it could be a great place to read and write fiction (and nonfiction…