A WordPress plugin that turns an author's own site into a serialised fiction platform, so the stories, the readers and the earnings all stay on something the author owns.
The project in short
Fictbase is a WordPress plugin we designed and built end to end. It turns an author's existing site into a place to publish serialised fiction chapter by chapter, the way Wattpad or Royal Road does, except the author keeps the site, the readers and the money.
Everything lives in the author's own WordPress database. There is no Fictbase account holding the work and nothing to migrate if they change their mind. The plugin is free on WordPress.org under the GPL: wordpress.org/plugins/fictbase.
What we were solving
The big fiction platforms bring readers, but they own the relationship. They decide what is allowed, they take a share of what the author earns, and when one closes or pivots the author loses the archive and the audience along with it.
Self-hosting avoids that but creates a different problem: WordPress has no concept of a story or a chapter. Clean chapter URLs, reading progress, next and previous navigation, paid chapters. None of it exists without stitching together plugins that almost fit, and the result still reads like a blog.
What we set out to do
Make an author's own site feel like a real fiction platform to a reader, while staying ordinary to run.
- Clean chapter URLs and a reading experience that feels designed, not improvised.
- Authors keep writing in the normal WordPress editor, with nothing new to learn.
- Stories are discoverable through search, tags, feeds and the sitemap.
- Authors who want to charge can, with the money going straight into their own Stripe account.
- No lock-in. Removing the plugin takes its data with it and leaves the site intact.
What we built
An ordinary WordPress plugin, published free on WordPress.org: wordpress.org/plugins/fictbase. It installs like any other and registers its own URL routes, so the author never builds a page by hand.
Stories and chapters stay in the author's database. The plugin adds the reading experience on top: chapter pages with progress and navigation, a filterable story archive, search, tag pages and RSS feeds. It works with any theme and only loads its styling on fiction pages.
Anything commercial sits outside the plugin. A separate Laravel service handles licences, subscriptions and payments and never touches the author's content, so the part of the system that could go away is not the part holding the writing.
What it does
Free, with no account needed:
- Unlimited stories and chapters in a full rich-text editor
- Clean chapter URLs, a scroll progress bar and next / previous navigation
- Light, dark and automatic reader themes, with adjustable text size and width
- Automatic word count and estimated reading time
- Story archive with genre and status filters, plus search across stories and chapters
- Tag pages, RSS feeds and sitemap entries so stories can actually be found
- Shortcodes and a REST API for anyone building on top of it
Paid tiers:
- Drip scheduling, so chapters release to a timetable
- Reader bookmarks and email notifications for new chapters
- Analytics dashboard with per-chapter figures
- Manuscript import from .docx, with chapters detected automatically
- Selling chapters or whole stories, with readers paying into the author's own Stripe account and Fictbase taking no cut
How we built it
The plugin is plain WordPress and PHP, written to WordPress.org's coding and security standards because anything less would not have passed their review: nonce checks, prepared statements, escaping on output and sanitising on input, as routine rather than a pass at the end. It runs on WordPress 6.3 and PHP 8.0 or newer, and makes no outbound requests at all, which is what lets the free version honestly say it collects nothing about a reader.
The marketing site is Next.js and React in TypeScript, styled with Tailwind. The licensing and billing service is Laravel on PHP 8.3, with Stripe for payments, two-factor authentication on accounts, and HTML Purifier cleaning any rich text a user submits.
Releases go through staging before production, and most of what changed after launch came from the support forum.
Where it stands now
Fictbase is live on WordPress.org, free under the GPL, and is being installed and updated by authors in the wild. It has kept shipping since launch, shaped by what came back through the support forum rather than a roadmap written up front.
It is our reference project for WordPress work: built to the standard the plugin directory actually reviews and accepts, with a paid service running alongside it and the boundary drawn so that a customer's content never depends on our servers staying up.