Don't Get Reamed By Ream

I am appropriately putting this up on Insecure Writers Support Group Wednesday because I read about it on the IWSG site.  The author talked about using a site called Ream that's sort of like Wattpad crossed with Patreon--only far more difficult to set up than either of those.  Whenever I read about something new-ish like that or Ko-fi or Payhip I like to go see if I can give it a try because Amazon sucks and I would love to be mostly free of them.  Or at least to have another revenue stream.

I soon wished I hadn't bothered.  Trying to get anything going on Ream was just a debacle.  I don't know who designed it but it's not user friendly.  At all.

The first thing is in order to "launch" your account you have to choose whether to let them manage the sales tax/VAT or to do it yourself.  They take 10% of sales no matter what, but if you choose to let them handle the taxes you can't get paid until you have over $50, so good luck ever getting paid for most people.  Either way you have to sign up for a Stripe account, which I didn't feel like trying to do right then so I couldn't even "launch" an account.

I tried putting up a story just to see how it worked.  They have the option to load a file, buuuut it is a huge debacle.  First it demands you give it unfettered access to Google Drive.  I was using my Eric Filler account which I never really use for Drive, so OK, whatever, but there's no way I would give anyone total access to my regular Drive, where they could in theory rifle through my personal files that aren't related to stories.  That's a dealbreaker right there.

Anyway, the next problem is you can't use a PDF, MOBI, ePub, DOC, or anything common and sensible like that.  Nope, you've got to have a Google Docs file.  Which I write my rough drafts on Docs but I proofread and format them in Word before loading the finished product.  Still, at least I had some files to choose from so I picked one of my Payhip exclusive stories.  Buuuuut it won't load because you need chapter titles in headers.  But I haven't got any chapters!  I tried putting a header into the Google Docs file...and still got the message about headers.  Ugh, so forget about that.

Instead I just copied and pasted it into the site and that seemed to load.  But of course no one can read it since I haven't "launched" because I don't feel like going to sign up for Stripe.  I then haven't really gotten around to see what the "community" is like or anything.

I honestly don't know why they make it so difficult, especially with loading stories.  That whole thing about needing access to my Google Drive seems skeevy.  Why can't I just upload a file in a common format instead of Google Docs?  It's weird.

I thought about signing up with Stripe after PayPal took such a high percentage of my initial sales on Payhip, but it just seems like another hassle I don't really need at the moment and I have no idea if they'd want to charge monthly fees or anything like that.  I doubt I'd make enough money there for it to be worth the effort.

But you can poke around on there if you want.  Maybe your experience will be better.