Guide to getting paid
Qwyre supports streaming micropayments though a new web standard called web monetization. Readers pay a subscription which allows them to make per-second payments as they read here.
For every second someone reads your work on Qwyre, you get paid. In real-time.
Web monetization for streaming micropayments
Unlike most publishing services, we don't keep the money you earn and then pay you out some time in the future. Payments here are direct and immediate.
Your work earns about 36 cents per hour, or 0.6 cents per minute. A 5,000 word short-story would take about 12 minutes to read and earn 7.2 cents. You need to be read 700 times to earn $50.
Streaming micropayments requires a special destination pointer (a digital wallet) to receive payments, and do this without charging any transaction fees. The two providers of these streaming payments wallets happen to also do crypto-currencies, but you don't have to have anything to do with that if you don't want to. There's nothing stopping Visa or Mastercard offering such a pointer, however, this new standard needs to become more widely-used first.
The mechanism uses something similar to crypto to get paid, and your cash is paid out in the standard currency of your choice. The default is US Dollars.
Create a payment pointer account
Creating a payment pointer / wallet is straightforward and well-described here — Digital Wallet and Payment Pointers — for each of the current wallet providers:
Once you have your pointer, simply save it to your personal profile.
NOTICE: Uphold does not currently permit sign-ups from people in Europe.
Streaming ebooks, and proportional revenue share
Web Monetization is a per-second payment stream and it requires a per-second product. For text, and ebooks specifically, that means a stream of words. Except they also have to carry markup so they're formatted properly on arrival.
Streaming means deliberately breaking data into chunks and streaming those in a format that permits live, iterative, building of the digital object from these chunks while also serving the content in that dynamic object.
A reader will receive the first 500 words of your work for free, and then - as long as they stream micropayments - a steady stream of words building up to a complete work. They can stop and start as they like, and the words they've purchased are recorded to ensure they do not pay more than once.
The tally is updated every second. The average person reads at 250 to 300 words per minute. A 10,000 word short-story can be read in about 40 minutes, while a 100,000 word novel will take about 6 to 7 hours.
Every minute we switch payment pointers in proportion to your contractual agreement. If you agree a 90:10 author:editor share, then 9 minutes of streaming revenue are the author's to every 1 minute for the editor.
These fees are paid direct. You'll see them arrive in your wallet in real time.
All contracts also include a Qwyre share which you can see on our fees page.