royalroad.com has thousands of stories in various subgenres of fantasy that are available for free.
The business model is, the author builds up a substantial number of pages/chapters, begins publishing on RR, when they reach a big enough readership they launch a patreon which is typically 20-50 pages ahead which their patreons can read.
Once they have a couple of books worth of material, they remove the first books worth of content from RR and publish it on Kindle Unlimited, which is an all you can read service for about $8 a month from amazon. They then move onto audible versions at a later date assuming all goes well. Physical books are a complete afterthought btw.
The readership doesn't care about typo's, grammer or editing or prose they just want the story.
I expect this will become a fairly standard model in multiple genres going forward.
I read a lot on RR too and support a half dozen authors on patreon. But I've also seen those authors complaining when their work gets pirated from RR or patreon and put elsewhere. It's a good model but I don't think it is any more immune to loss of earnings from piracy then the models that have gone before.
Definitely a fan of this model. Anecdotal, but I recently subscribed to AMC+ because the pirate streaming site I was using didn't have the latest episode of a show I wanted to watch. I could have waited a literal day, or gone to a torrent tracker, but paying the $9 was just easier and shows support for the show.
royalroad.com has thousands of stories in various subgenres of fantasy that are available for free.
The business model is, the author builds up a substantial number of pages/chapters, begins publishing on RR, when they reach a big enough readership they launch a patreon which is typically 20-50 pages ahead which their patreons can read.
Once they have a couple of books worth of material, they remove the first books worth of content from RR and publish it on Kindle Unlimited, which is an all you can read service for about $8 a month from amazon. They then move onto audible versions at a later date assuming all goes well. Physical books are a complete afterthought btw.
The readership doesn't care about typo's, grammer or editing or prose they just want the story.
I expect this will become a fairly standard model in multiple genres going forward.