Reading is a private
act of attention.
The platforms most readers and writers use today were not designed for reading or writing. They were designed for something else — engagement, conversion, retention — and reading happens to take place inside them.
This is why a book on Amazon costs the author 65% of every sale and why Audible takes three-quarters of every audiobook. It is why discovery on every major book platform can be purchased. It is why the email address of the reader who finished your fifth book belongs to the platform, not to you.
None of this is inevitable. It is a series of choices, made by platforms that needed those choices to make money the way they make money. Different choices are possible. Spine is built around them.
We pay authors 87.5% of every sale — the same rate at $0.99 as at $19.99, with no penalties for pricing outside an arbitrary band. We do not require exclusivity. Authors cannot pay to rank higher in discovery, be featured, or otherwise promote their books on Spine — not now, not ever. The reader email list belongs to the author.
What Spine is, structurally, is peer-to-peer publishing. The writer is the publisher. The reader is the customer. The platform is a thin layer of plumbing in between, taking just enough to keep the lights on. There is no acquisitions editor choosing winners. No advance to recoup. No print-run risk forcing safe bets. No marketing department deciding which books deserve push. No slot allocated to whichever publisher paid most this quarter. The author keeps creative control, sets their own price, owns their reader list, and walks away with the majority of every sale.
Major publishing exists for a reason. It can produce books indies cannot — editorial depth, marketing reach, bookstore relationships, the scaffolding that makes a debut novel into a household name. We are not anti-major-publishing. We are pro-author-choice. A writer should be able to pick the deal that fits their book and their life, not the only deal a gatekeeper will offer them.
The math of major publishing is what it is: an author typically receives 8–15% of a book's cover price after their agent's cut, and only after earning out their advance — which most books never do. The structural reasons that share stays small are not improving. Spine is the venue for writers who want a different deal: lower friction, higher author share, direct relationship with readers, no gatekeeper deciding what gets discovered.
Peer-to-peer publishing means readers can find writers who would never have crossed an acquisitions editor's desk, and writers can find readers who would never have walked into a Barnes & Noble. The middle layer that used to be necessary — to print, distribute, and surface books — has gotten thinner every year. Spine is what that middle layer looks like when it's honest about being a middle layer.
We treat the reader's attention as sacred. Reading itself is unconditionally ad-free for every reader on Spine — there are no ads between chapters, no sponsored interruptions, no pop-ups while you read. There are no infinite scroll feeds, no engagement-maximizing notifications, no algorithmic boosts to keep you in the app one minute longer. Discovery on Spine will be reader-signal driven — no author can buy higher placement, ever — and the algorithm's weights will be published when it ships. Today the discovery page is chronological while the platform is being built. Spine may display third-party ads on platform surfaces like the homepage and discover page to fund the platform; those ads are clearly labeled, never appear inside the reader, and never affect which books are surfaced to you. Readers who prefer no ads anywhere on the platform can subscribe to Premium membership.
Live readings will be a permanent venue — authors hosting, listeners attending, recordings archived. The audiobook layer will be the same book with audio attached, with your place syncing across modes. Both are in active development.
One percent of every platform fee Spine collects will be contributed to Stripe Climate, which funds frontier carbon removal companies — not offsets, but actual removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. The contribution flows automatically with each transaction once sales launch. Stripe publishes quarterly transparency reports.
None of this requires you to trust us. The royalty math is published. The discovery weights will be published when the algorithm ships. The privacy commitments are being encoded in the terms of service as binding obligations. We are giving up flexibility on the things that matter, on purpose, so that you can read the platform's stance and know it.
Reading is a private act of attention. Spine exists to protect it.