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We know how much hard work and care goes into making a story. When you upload on Tapas, your story is completely your own: you automatically have full creative and publishing rights.

Who are we?

Part of our Content Team...Good at helping creators, not so good at jumping in sync

What do we do?

At its core, Tapas is an open publishing platform for original stories. That means we’re a site that is free for anyone and everyone to use. We want to make sure you never have to worry about maintaining a website or paying hosting fees, so you can use your time to focus on your craft and interact with your fans.

Most of all, we want to foster a supportive online community of readers and creators. We love hearing your feedback, and we truly appreciate every one of you for helping us reach our goal!

What do we provide for every creator?

- A clean, aesthetic site that’s easy and free to use

- Potential spotlight, staff picks, and featured recommendation lists to help grow your - audience

- An interactive reader community with comment sections, creator walls, and forums

- Ways to earn money with ad revenue and tipping

From there, we’re always looking for more ways to encourage your creative journey—that's why we offer several opportunities for creators to get financial support for their work. Yes, that means you can earn money by creating stories!

Earning Opportunities

Tapas provides several tools for creators to make money from their comic or novel. For any series, Ad Revenue and Tipping provides creators a way to earn money from page views and fan contributions. For Premium series, our Premium Program allows you to create paid stories where readers can use coins to unlock episodes and support your series.

Every creator gets their own Dashboard, where they can track earnings from Ad Revenue and Tapas Coins generated from Tipping. When your account balance reaches at least $25, you can cash out!

Ad Revenue

Our Ad Revenue Program is open to qualifying creators that are 18 years and older. While ads help keep our website running, about 70% of ad revenue goes straight to creators.

We use unobtrusive ads that are designed around the story: no pop-ups or pop-unders here! We may experiment with different ad positions or networks from time to time, but only to up potential earnings for creators—and never in ways that might hurt the reading experience.

Tapas Coins

Tapas Coins are our in-app currency that make it easy for creators to earn money. Fans can support their favorite creators by tipping them with coins or by unlocking new episodes of their Premium series.

Users can purchase Tapas Coins on the website and apps, or they can earn coins for free by completing sponsored offers, watching video ads, inviting friends to Tapas, or participating in special events.

Every 12 Tapas Coins are roughly equal to one cent ($0.01) in USD. Once coins are tipped or used to unlock premium episodes, they translate into real money for the creator! These earnings can be viewed on the Creator Dashboard.

Tipping Program

Tipping is a way for readers to give kudos to their favorite creators by sending coins to them directly. For creators, Tipping can be turned on from the Creator Dashboard once 250 subscribers have been reached. When readers use coins for Tipping, roughly 85% goes to creators (after any 3rd party fees) and 15% helps fund Tapas!

Premium Program

In our Premium Program, Tapas provides the opportunity for top-notch creators to publish a paid series. The first few episodes of these series are free to read, and the rest are unlockable with Tapas coins. Our goal is never to lock readers out of experiencing these stories, so we work hard to provide as many options as possible to earn coins to unlock episodes and directly support creators.

Going Premium is a way for both Tapas and creators to receive funding: we usually share revenue 50-50. In return, our staff works with the creators to give them professional editing and marketing for a full-on publishing experience!

Each Premium series gets an editor who guides them through the publishing process and offers proofreading and suggestions for each episode. A Premium series qualifies for special banners and marketing on the Tapas website and app, helping them expand their audience and directly reach new readers. Premium creators also have a dashboard that lets them track their earnings in real-time and see when and where people are buying their episodes.

Where do we get our Premium stories?

Sometimes Tapas staff approaches community creators we admire and offer them the chance to make their series Premium. We also partner with Korean and Chinese publishers and creators to present official English translations for their comics, and these become Premium series.

With over 100 new series being created every day, we know that we can’t reach out to every creator who’s interested in Premium! If you want to join our Premium program, you can always pitch us your novel or comic if you meet the following requirements: you should have at least 2,000 subscribers on Tapas and at least 3 published episodes. Once you meet these guidelines, send us an email with your pitch to submissions@tapasmedia.co!

For more details about the programs we offer for creators, take a look at our Terms of Service!

What about creative rights?

Just like community creators, creators of Premium series always own the rights to their story. Your creative freedom is very important to us, and we want to support you!

If you have a Premium series, you also have the option to choose to share some rights with Tapas, which allows Tapas to be an agent for your series. In this case, Tapas can pitch your story to more companies for future opportunities like TV series, game adaptations, or international distribution.

There are even more opportunities to partner with Tapas in co-production projects like the Creator Incubator, which is a chance to create a comic alongside the Tapas team and expand your story’s reach even further. Co-productions also include shared rights, which we make sure to discuss fairly with creators before starting a contract.

If you’re wondering about all the details of co-production, IP sharing, and partnering with Tapas to take your stories to the next level, check out Part 2 of the Tapas and Creators series to learn more!

*Editor's note: This article has been updated on July 13, 2018 to properly reflect the correct subscriber count requirement for Tipping activation. The previous version of this article stated it was 500, but the correct number is 250. We apologize for the miscommunication.