Through Patreon, Substack, half-hearted attempts by big tech platforms, and beyond, paid subscriptions have significantly expanded the economy around creative work online. It's allowed a huge number of people the freedom to work on what they care about, when they want to, and with who they want to.

But each day, we feel the shortcomings of paid subscriptions a bit more: deciding how much to charge, what to paywall, what perks to offer. And something about paid subscriptions lacks emotional appeal: it can feel transactional, especially for early supporters.

For many writer & creators, launching a paid subscription is a vulnerable moment. You’re asking for money for your work for the first time. Those first supporters provide tremendous value beyond their dollars. Their early vote of confidence guides writers & creators through the early slog of any creative effort.

Yet paid subscriptions don't really feel emotionally rewarding to early supporters, and they certainly don't allow for any sharing in the upside of the growth they helped spark.

Today, we're introducing writer coins to help solve these problems. We want writer coins to be an easy way for readers to back a writer across all their work, signal they were early, and participate in the writer's growth over time.

Launching your writer coin is a great opportunity to invite your readers, subscribers, and followers to back your work. There's a decent chance most activity will happen around when you launch your writer coin, so it's important to share your launch with the world.

Some things you could consider as part of that announcement:

• Tell the origin story behind your writing, why you write, and remind folks what you write about.

• Let folks know any ideas you have for how to reward or show your appreciation for those that buy your writer coin.

• Invite your early readers to become early backers.

Before you launch, you can send an allocation of your writer coin (~5% of total) to those that have supported you in the past. Rewards are a great way to show your appreciation to those that have supported you in the past, but also to spark early interest and discussion around your writer coin.

We make it easy to send rewards by providing a few out-of-the-box groups to send rewards to:

1. Readers that have collected your posts on Paragraph and Mirror.

2. Readers that have purchased your post coins on Paragraph.

3. With coin pairing, holders of your Zora or Base app creator coins or other ERC 20s.

4. Your current subscribers.

5. Your followers on Farcaster and Base app.

For collectors, supporters, and coin holders, rewards are weighted by how much they've paid you in the past. For each group, you can view each of the recipients and how many coins they will receive. If you prefer, you can uncheck any of the groups from receiving rewards, or skip rewards all together.

By default, writer coins are paired with Wrapped ETH (WETH), but you can pair with other tokens instead.

If you pair with your Zora or Base app creator coin, both coins grow together in lock-step. This is perfect for artists and creators who write about their work on Paragraph. Plus, pairing lets you automatically share writer coins with your existing creator coin holders.

We've woven writer coins naturally into the reading experience:

• Readers will be prompted to buy your writer coin as they browse your publication and read your posts (any “Support” or primary button opens the writer coin purchase flow).

• New subscribers can immediately become backers with one extra tap.

• The purchase flow strips away all the crypto and coin complexity, serving as just a simple way to support.

In addition, a new discovery feed highlights publications backed by writer coins, so your support directly translates into more visibility for their work.

Looking forward, we’re excited to continue building writer coins into a meaningful, long-term way for readers to support writers and share in their growth. Over the coming months we’ll focus on a few key areas:

• Use rewards to encourage valuable behavior. Build reward mechanisms that credit actions that actually help writers grow: impact-generating shares, thoughtful comments & discourse, buying a writer coin & other types of support, all while preventing spam and ill-intentioned behavior.

• Enable repeat buying. Let readers buy a writer coin on a recurring basis so they can continually back a writer & share in their growth, providing a better alternative to paid subscriptions.

• Make buying effortless. Reduce the steps and interactions required to purchase a writer coin, offer strong defaults with some flexibility, and remove unnecessary complexity so supporting a writer is a simple, meaningful action.

Your biggest fans don't just want to read your work. They want to be part of it. Writer coins make that possible, turning your writing journey into something you build together.

To get started, head to your Paragraph dashboard and start the writer coin launch flow.

And explore the discovery feed to find great writers already backed by their communities and support the ones you believe in.

We'd love to hear what you think or any feedback — send a note to hello@paragraph.com.