Note: This post includes images of women who’ve been subject to physical abuse.
Imagine you’re me, and you’re mindlessly scrolling the news feed on Facebook, looking at posts from the various animal groups you’re in, and you see this.
And then this.
You hide them, of course, but they just keep coming.
Eventually you forget what you originally used Facebook for. Now it is simply the omegaverse fanfiction app. You find yourself missing the simplicity of minion memes and engagement photos.
For those of you who didn’t grow up reading fanfiction, omegaverse fanfiction refers to a subgenre of fanfiction where characters have vaguely wolf-like characteristics, and relationships revolve around an alpha/beta/omega dynamic. Omegaverse fanfiction can be found for almost any fandom, as evidenced by a quick scroll through the Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics tag on Archive on Our Own, where you’ll find some 118,908 works with the tag.
While I have read fanfic in the past, Omegaverse has never been my thing, and even if it had been, it’s fairly jarring to see it on Facebook, home of baby announcements and life updates from distant relatives, particularly when the images used feature women who’ve been brutalised or werewolf-men looking intimidating and creepy as hell.
A quick Google search told me I wasn’t alone in being subjected to these ads, with many people taking to Reddit to complain about or make fun of them, particularly in the ‘Men Writing Women’ subreddit and subreddits dedicated to posting cringe.
I posted in the Garbage Day discord server about it, and found one other person who’s also had these ads inflicted upon them. We both felt relief at finding another person who had been made to suffer these bizarre ads.
While both of us have visited AO3 before, neither of us read Omegaverse fanfiction, and anyway, another user on the Garbage Day Discord assured me that AO3 doesn’t use Facebook trackers.
Instead, as far as we could tell, we both simply fell into the demographic of women who speak English (UK) or (US), are over the age of 18, and live in the United States (her) or Australia (me). In her case, the ad targeting info included interests, but none of the ones I checked did; they were just sending these ads out to any woman in Australia over the age of 18 (sometimes with an upper limit of 55, sometimes not).
When I say these have been flooding my news feed, I mean flooding. Here’s a screenshot of all the pages I hid ads from in one day over the weekend:
Many of the ads don’t even link to Facebook pages, just directly to the apps they’re promoting in the App Store. Of the ones that do link to Facebook pages, most are inactive and have very few likes.
Dreame, a name that you can see is used by several advertisers, is connected to an app that is 9th in the free apps section of the Books category on the App Store. Others include:
Galatea, ranked 11th in the Books category
Fantastia, ranked 21st
Webfic, ranked 22nd
Webnovel, ranked 23rd
AnyStories, ranked 44th
Stary Pte Ltd., the publisher behind the Dreame - Read Best Romance app, has also published several other similar apps: FicFun, Stary Writing, Innovel, Sueñovela, and Starynovel. Sueñovela is for Spanish readers and Innovel is for Indonesian readers, while Stary Writing is for budding writers. FicFun and Starynovel both appear to be very similiar to Dreame, however, with a focus on serving as a platform for readers looking for new stories, particularly in the romance and fantasy genres.
Naturally, I downloaded a bunch of these apps to try and understand what their deal was. Honestly, they’re all variations on the same theme, so I’m going to focus on Dreame, since it appears to be the most prolific.
The app is essentially incredibly horny Wattpad with an emphasis on A/B/O dynamics. Lot of Lycan Prince love interests. I even found a few stories with over a million views that had been used in the ads I’d seen, including The Lycan King’s Mate, Her Triplet Alphas, and Prince Reagan. For stories in the ‘pay-to-read’ program, users have to pay in Dreame coins to read past the first few chapters of a story. You can buy Dreame coins using real money in the app. AO3 would never.
As a writer, what interested me most was the ‘To Be A Dreame Writer!’ tab, which outlines the different ways you can make money as a writer of horny werewolf fanfiction. The first is by listing your story in their ‘pay-to-read’ program, where you’ll receive a percentage of the money that readers pay to unlock VIP chapters. Another way is by participating in the Dreame Writing Academy Competition, where you’ll get the chance to win a $45,000USD prize. There’s also the full-time writer program, allowing you to write at home with a stable monthly income. The link at the bottom of this page instructs you to download Stary Writing to start your writing career, so I did just that.
Stary appears to almost constantly be running competitions offering huge amounts of prize money, with their current Love Story Contest offering $219,000 in prize money. To enter, you start writing a story on Stary Writing, tagging it with #Dreame Writing Marathon — Love Story Contest, and when you’ve written more than 3000 words, you can click ‘apply for contract’ to submit your story for review. The company demands exclusivity, meaning you can’t cross-publish to any of their competitors, and entries must have a word count of at least 200,000 words before the end of the competition to qualify for the major prizes.
As for writer benefits, the app mentions potential $50USD ‘new story bonuses’ when you’ve written a story longer than 30,000 words, as well as a monthly $150USD daily update bonus.
Meanwhile, Stary Exclusive Writers can earn as much as $850 a month.
Assuming you write 50,000 words a month (based on the requirements for the ‘daily update bonus’), that works out to $0.017 a word.
Another Garbage Day fan sent me this post from an author, Christopher D Schmitz, who was approached by Dreame in 2018 after finding some success on Wattpad. They offered him $60USD for his story, but he would be giving up the right to share his work electronically (i.e. via ebook) and “possibly they would get the audible rights as well”.
Schmitz explicitly asked Dreame how his story would make money, to which they responded, “Stories with good performance will be put behind the pay wall. We will see from the data analysis. And Author will have a 30% share after the income gained by the Work exceeds the whole cost paid by us, including without limitation the royalty paid to Author, marketing fee and other costs charged by any third parties.
Author will have access to the sales amount in the author center, but since now our author center is still in development, which might be available in several months. And at present, we are investing extra amount of money to promote our stories as well as our app. But we will share the records to our authors if the profits exceed our investment before the author center is set up.”
FicFun contracts are similarly alarming, particularly in terms of ownership: “Electronic copyright: the author, though for the three years after payment of author remuneration, FicFun will have exclusive rights to freely publish contracted stories natively or on third-party websites and to charge for readership access. After three years, FicFun will only retain the right to freely publish contracted works on its own website. Without authorization by FicFun, authors will not be allowed to delete contracted works.”
Schmitz has also kindly reproduced the contract he was sent, so you can head over to his blog if you really enjoy reading legalese.
A quick search on the r/writing subreddit for ‘Dreame’ brings up a number of posts from authors who’ve been approached by the company to sign over the rights to their work in exchange for a small one-time payment and 30% of profits from the pay-to-read program. The r/Wattpad subreddit has a post warning users about Dreame and WebNovel, a similar company based in China.
Google searches also brought me to Quora, where multiple people had posted asking if Dreame was a scam or not. Here’s one user’s emphatic response:
Trying to understand more about the company itself, I went to Stary’s website, which informed me that Stary is “an entertainment company of storytelling”. I also discovered they have apps for Russian, Tagalog, and Portuguese readers, in addition to their English, Spanish and Indonesian offerings. Their website doesn’t appear to be updated very often, with the most recent ‘news’ article mentioning one of the company’s products being from November 2020.
LinkedIn gave me a little more info, namely that Stary is a private equity firm based in Singapore that acts as a holding company for Dreame. A look at their employees’ profiles suggests their employees are located across South East Asia, in Singapore and Jakarta as well as Shenzen and the Philippines.
While their business model sounds like it’s a step above vanity publishing, where writers are asked to pay to have their work published, writers are still getting a raw deal out of this relationship. While it’s not clear how much money Dreame brings in for Stary, a small initial payment of something like $60 and then just 30% of proceeds from readers paying to read your work is not anywhere approaching equitable.
Being plucked from sites like Wattpad and being offered money for your work can seem like a dream come true – after all, most fanfic writers are doing it for fun, and they don’t expect to have careers like Cassandra Clare or E.L. James. This dynamic can lead to people agreeing to things without properly reading the contract (or having a legal professional look over it), without really understanding what they’re agreeing to, particularly in terms of ownership of their work and ongoing payment. That seems to be what Dreame is counting on, much like vanity publishers count on people not knowing that paying to get published isn’t something proper publishers ask of you.
“I mean why the hel is my mate chained to a wall, shaking, half naked and covered in cuts and bruises!” is an excerpt that is featured on ads from multiple different advertisers (as seen above); a quick Google search told me that it’s from a story first published in 2015 called ‘The Alpha’s Princess’.
It’s only been published on Wattpad, as in, I could not find it on the apps linked to in the ads using the story for promotional purposes. Is this fanfiction stolen valour?
Will I ever truly understand why I have had to deal with all of these ads where my friends have not? Probably not. And I don’t think any of the Googling I’ve done in the course of writing this post will have helped matters. Maybe I should just embrace my fate and get really into Witcher fanfiction where Geralt is the Alpha and Jaskier is his Omega. Resistance almost feels futile at this point.