On Episode, your reader can engage with your story in more ways than just reading! One of those ways is for them to use gems on specific moments in your story to extend their experience. If you’re here, it means you’re ready and open to experiment on how to best add or use gem features in your story! In this section, we’ll go over the options available to you—gem choices, early access and skip-the-wait—and tips for how to get started.
A Quick Overview
There are 3 gems features available for use in stories:
- Gem Choices
- These are choice moments that you create and code yourself within each chapter; this is the feature that best lets your creativity shine!
- Early Access
- This is a feature that you can apply to new episode(s) you’re about to publish. For one week, readers can use gems to get early access to your latest content before it’s made available to everyone with passes and ads as usual.
- Skip-the-Wait
- This is a feature that you can apply to all of your episodes (including those you’re about to publish). Once activated, readers can use gems to skip a short wait between reading batches of episodes.
How do gem features help my story?
When readers use gems on any of these moments, those gems get factored as a part of your story’s overall engagement score, which is what our leaderboards use to rank all of our community stories.
The higher your engagement score, the higher your story rank, giving you a better chance at being more easily discoverable by readers.
Gem features can also help you reach your goals of entering the Writer’s Payments program with a smaller, dedicated readership. Offering your fans unique experiences in exchange for their support can help boost gems spent overall in your story, and contribute towards unlocking the Writer’s Payments program or increasing your Writer’s Payment.
How many gem features can I use in my story?
You can choose to use as many of the features as you want!
How do I decide what gem features to use?
The most flexible gem feature for adding unique experiences into your story is Gem Choices. You get to determine what content you want to put behind a gem option, and how many gems your reader would use to read it. Stories with the gem features that perform the highest see the majority of their gems spent come from unique gem choices that provide their readers with fun and engaging content they can't get anywhere else!
- Because Gem Choices offer you the most creative freedom, they can also be the most challenging to brainstorm. Check out this guide to get started!
If you’re publishing new episodes fairly regularly, publishing them with Early Access can boost gem use in your stories and contribute towards a consistent release schedule for your readers.
- Readers that are willing to use gems to read your story pass- and ad-free before Early Access ends get exclusive content before anyone else.
If you’ve built up enough episodes in your story, adding a short break at regular intervals can create a consistent gem experience that helps boost gem use in your stories.
- Readers that are willing to use gems to read your story pass- and ad-free before Skip-the-Wait ends on any applicable episodes get to read as much content as they want, on-demand.
Keep in mind you may need to experiment to find what works for your storytelling process (including your release schedule), and your story.
To see how well your use of these gem features is doing at boosting gems used in your story, you can always go to the Gems tab in your Story Dashboard.