Sponsored Stories

Help & Info
1

What is a Sponsored Story

Writing and publishing novels, illustrations or other similar products for our specific genre can be quite challenging. That’s why we decided to allow authors and other artists to promote their work on Gay Spiral Stories.

With a very small fee (which will contribute to our monthly hosting expenses), you can place a teaser story (possibly with illustrations) on our website.

Such a “sponsored story” is then highlighted and will be pinned to the site’s home page for a certain number of days:

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Links to Amazon or to some other site (e.g. Patreon), where a potential customer can buy your product, will be placed at the end of the teaser story:

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How to place a Sponsored Story

There is a one-time fee to place a sponsored story on Gay Spiral Story:

  • $10 for pinning the teaser story for 5 days
  • $15 for pinning the teaser story for 10 days

After the this time has passed, the story will start to scroll down together with the rest of the normal stories. It will remain on the site unless you ask us to remove it.

We’re using our own Patreon page to handle the payment. Just go there and pledge the intended amount ($10 or $15).

Note: Patreon always charges all users at the beginning of a month. So if you pledge, you won’t be charged until the 1st of the next month!
For us it’s sufficient that you’ve placed your pledge, even if you haven’t been charged yet.

After the pledge has been charged once, you’re free to reduce or cancel your Patreon pledge. You only have to pay once for your Sponsored Story, but of course we’ll always appreciate an ongoing support of GSS.

Then you can submit your story as usual. As an active Patreon you can now click the “Sponsored Story” check button on the story submission page:

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Then another input area opens up where you can fill in some more fields to define the way your teaser story is displayed (cover image, teaser text and purchase buttons). The fields are all explained (hover the mouse over the small info button), but if you have any questions about how to fill them, you can write an email to admin@gayspiralstories.com.

Then save your story and make sure that everything is looking the way you want it to (you can make any number of changes using the “Edit” function). Once you’re happy, click “Publish”.

We will check if everything is in order and approve your story, usually within 12 hours. If there are issues, we will write an email (please make sure to give us a valid email address, so we can reach you!).

3

So I dont know if this is posdible or even wanted but I had the idea on maybe having a sort of top subbar section where sponsored stories might go. (And when there is no sponsored stories you could have some other random story listed there.) That way the normal story area doesn’t get all weird like it does when thete is a sponsored story. And by weird I mean how stories flow on a timescale thing.

4

Is that really that much of an issue, that the clearly marked sponsored stories stay at the top and float down like 10 days later?

Since they’re marked I didn’t think it would confuse anybody that they’re listed outside of the usual order.

5

Not really much of an issue, no. Hehe. It was just a thought I had. Honestly, the only thing that was a little off was how new stories didn’t get marked. But in general things are good.

6

Heh. I’m actually glad that the “new story star” malfunctioning is missed so much. That way I know that people are really using this feature :slight_smile: .

That problem is not related to the sponsored stories, as I’ve already said on Discord, it was caused by me accidentally setting the a publishing date into the future (16th of October) for a story. That caused that date to be stored on each users’ browser with the effect that no story published before that date would ever be marked as new.

After the 16th this fixes itself. Or you simply delete all site data for GSS in your browser.

8

Just a heads up you’re still referencing Patreon in this post. I’d imagine you’re using Sponsus for payment now?

9

Correct.

You can read about this and how you place sponsored stories here:

To add a sponsored story you need to get a tier 3 sponsorship.

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