For Authors
How Payouts Work
No hidden math, no waiting on a quarterly statement. Here's exactly how a coin turns into real money in your bank account.
Step 1
A reader unlocks your chapter
Readers buy coins and spend them to unlock your premium chapters. Coins convert at a fixed rate: 100 coins = $1.
Step 2
You keep 70% automatically
The moment a chapter unlocks, 70% of what the reader paid is added to your balance. No approval step, no waiting for a monthly report — it happens instantly and you can watch it happen in your earnings dashboard.
Step 3
Request a payout anytime you're over $20
Once your balance passes $20, request a payout whenever you want. Requests under $250 are approved automatically. There's a short cooldown between requests to keep things sane on our end — it's not a stall tactic.
Step 4
Money lands in your bank account via Stripe
We send your payout as a direct transfer to your connected Stripe account, which deposits to your real bank account on its normal payout schedule — typically within a few business days.
The Actual Math
Say a reader spends 200 coins ($2.00) to unlock one of your chapters:
$2.00
Reader pays
$1.40
You earn (70%)
$0.60
Platform fee (30%)
That 70/30 split applies to every single unlock, shown as it happens in your earnings dashboard. No revenue-share tiers to unlock, no algorithm deciding your rate.
Is 70% Actually Good?
If you've never sold your writing directly before, 70/30 might sound arbitrary. Here's the honest comparison, so you can judge it against what actually exists elsewhere instead of a number in a vacuum:
Authors don't get a direct cut at all — the platform keeps 100% of ad revenue, or pays fractions of a cent per view only after steep traffic thresholds most writers never reach.
Several major platforms only let a small, hand-picked group of contracted authors monetize at all. Everyone else writes for free, indefinitely, with no path to payment.
Standard royalties run roughly 10–15% of the cover price for a typical book deal — and that's after an advance, an agent, and often a year or more before a reader ever sees it.
Every author gets the same 70% the moment they publish. No approval tier, no traffic threshold, no waiting period — you see it land in your balance the second a reader unlocks a chapter.
We're not claiming to be the biggest platform out there — we're new, and we say so. But the 30% we keep funds hosting, payment processing, and building the site; it's not a black box, and it's not disguised as a "fee" on top of a smaller cut, the way some platforms structure it.
Why We Use Stripe
We route every payout through Stripe Connect instead of building our own payments system, for one simple reason: it's the safest way to get money into your bank account, and it's the industry standard used by Substack, Patreon, and most platforms that pay creators directly.
It's fast to set up
Connecting your account takes a few minutes from your earnings dashboard — basic identity and bank details, handled entirely by Stripe. We never see or store your bank information.
Your money, verifiably yours
Stripe is a regulated payments company used by millions of businesses. Once a payout is sent, it's an actual bank transfer to your account, not platform credit.
Quick Facts
- 100 coins = $1.00, fixed — the rate never changes on you
- 70% of every unlock is yours, credited instantly
- $20 minimum balance to request a payout
- Requests under $250 are approved automatically
- A short cooldown between requests keeps processing manageable, not to slow you down
- You always see your live balance and full earnings history in your dashboard
Ready to see it for yourself, or want the fuller picture of why we built ForgeScroll this way?