While I was on vacation recently, Facebook Reels and TikTok pushed me several ads for serial reading apps. Generally, ads show a provocative image or video, enhance it with equally provocative text, and offer a few sample chapters right in the social media app. (Below is one of the tamest ads I’ve seen.) Since I was in the market for fluffy, bite-size, low-barrier-to-entry reading, I checked out a few apps and wound up downloading Galatea, which claims to have 5 million readers.
Do I cherish books like This Is How You Lose the Time War, The Name of the Wind, and Children of Blood and Bone?
Yes.
With that in mind, would I be at all likely to jump right in to My Sexy Stepbrother Is a Werebear?
Also yes.
The Galatea app is the reading app arm of Inkitt, a Germany-based serial reading/writing website that you may recognize from its spammy, misleading invitations to join writing contests to win publishing contracts. (Learn more from Writer Beware.)
Inkitt’s business model is to publish serialized fiction on its website, collect reader feedback, then use its algorithms to select and promote the most popular stories on the Galatea app: “Upload your manuscript on Inkitt to grow your community, receive feedback from readers, and see your readership grow,” the Inkitt website states. It continues, “When your book becomes a hit on Inkitt, you’ll receive a publishing contract on Galatea.” Like Wattpad, the Inkitt platform encourages readers to offer feedback and ratings on chapters as they are uploaded.
Because I downloaded a couple serial reading apps, I was targeted for more ads. I started downloading the app for every ad I was pushed and now have a folder of over 20 serial reading apps, most from East Asian developers. I’ve taken a look at the interface and sample chapters for all of them.
Here’s what they all have in common:
- Screenshots are forbidden. Galatea and some other apps blank out screenshots so no text shows. Screen mirroring and visible text in multiple-app views is also disabled. In other apps, a screenshot brings up a dialogue box warning against copyright violation by screenshotting. The apps seem very concerned with attempts to pirate stories.
- You must pay for access to chapters after the first few free chapters. Payment is usually made via in-app purchase of coins or points. Several apps will unlock new chapters on a timer (but there is no limit on the number of books that can be counting down at once). I found only one app that instead pushes text and video ads after every other page (unless you unlock chapters with coins, of course).
- Access can get very expensive very fast. One app pushed me a story with 935 (!) chapters and estimated I would need over 13,500 in-app coins to read the whole book. The cost for 13,500 coins would have been $267.
- The chapters are very short. Inkitt recommends chapters of 1500–4000 words, but I’ve seen some as short as a single phone screen in length.
- Stories are usually highly dramatic, romantic, and sexually explicit; they frequently feature werewolves (but not Omegaverse werewolves), aliens, other cryptids, and (especially for East Asian apps) complex family dynamics.
- Female leads are usually beautiful and pure of heart, and they may be (creepily) childlike in their naivete or possess a mouth capable (usually just metaphorically) of spitting fire.
- Male leads are usually “dominant” and possessive, which is par for the course in heavily cryptid-centered content as well as in mafia and billionaire romance.
Galatea itself has some nice features that do bring it a level above the competition:
- You can search by several genres or subgenres. That said, Punished by the Alpha is available in the Mystery category. Grain of salt.
- Stories carry content warning tags that are surprisingly inclusive. For example, one story had a content warning tag for ableism. Be warned that stories almost universally have a content warning for sexual assault—and if they don’t, they probably should. The need to publish high-stakes plotlines prompts authors to push female characters into danger, and often the shorthand for danger is sexual assault.
- Galatea offers some books with immersive sound. Background music and sound effects follow your reading progress. Spooky story? Spooky music. Sound effects like door knocks and ominous footsteps are included.
- Galatea offers audiobooks with AI narrators. Some audiobooks have a choose-your-narrator function so you can switch between any of five AI narrators. One option is meant to emulate a male/female pair. The AI narration is not terribly good (one book had the narrator pronouncing resume like résumé, for example).
- Popular Galatea books are being offered as graphic novels generated with AI. The style is usually cutesy for female characters and highly angular for male characters.
Galatea is also making print versions of popular books available for sale and has launched Galatea TV for serial video viewing.
Galatea has a unique payment model. Although you can buy in-app points to purchase chapters individually—or wait to unlock chapters on a six-hour timer—you can also pay a flat fee of $70 for a year of unlimited reading. Knowing my reading rate, I chose that option. Purchased in bundles, points cost about 10 cents each in the smallest bundle (40 points for $3.99) and a little less than five cents each in the largest bundle (550 for $24.99). Presumably, when an author’s chapter is unlocked, a portion of the purchase price goes to them. However, Inkitt did not respond when I reached out to ask whether this is the case and, if so, what the author’s split is. Galatea has no in-app rating system or tip jar for authors, but it does allow readers to comment on chapters.
Inkitt recently received funding of $37 million. Says Tech Crunch: “The new funding that it’s raised, a Series C, will be used to expand the kind of content it produces: AI to write stories based on your original ideas and to produce versions of its fiction personalized for specific readers; a move into games and audiobooks; and more video content adapted from fiction published on its platform—video that is produced with humans today but will, eventually, also be generated using AI.”
In other words, Galatea wants to monetize AI-generated content. This begs a few questions: How much of Galatea’s current content is AI generated? How much of it is worth the read? I have looked at several serial reading apps that seem to provide solely AI-generated stories. The content is universally awful and clearly AI generated or AI translated: “Mary felt a sharp pain on the side of her forehead. This was due to the excess of nervousness that he [Mary] was suffering at the moment.” The same story jumped pronouns and tenses as well, and it moved from first- to second- to third-person point of view with almost every sentence. And then there was the story in which the lowercase e had been replaced with €, the symbol for the euro, in every instance of the word penis.
Galatea, on the other hand, offers books I believe were written by a human and would expect to find in any of the prominent print romance lines. In fact, some Galatea authors (e.g., Pepper Winters) are noted as having hit prominent bestseller lists. These authors often have their own presence on TikTok and other social media and may make their titles available on Amazon.
But some Galatea stories do come off as either AI generated or AI translated. (Inkitt is a multinational platform.) For example, here’s a passage from The Sapphire Queen, a vampire novel by “Silver Taurus.” The female lead is a blue-eyed vampire descended from Dracula: “The reason I’m a direct descendant and the king isn’t is that I have eyes that look like rocks. My magic comes from these. My long jet-black hair and sapphire eyes complement my features well.”
I probably would have accepted eyes that look like gemstones. But rocks? That strikes me as an AI error. So does the apparent lack of understanding about how genetics work.
Other frequent errors in Galatea (and other serial reading apps) include:
- misuse of near homophones: Once I saw hammy down instead of hand-me-down. Rivets of blood instead of rivulets.
- continuity errors: White wolf paws are black in a subsequent chapter. A character who had intercourse in chapter 13 is completely inexperienced in chapter 15.
- infrequent use of common English contractions: Don’t and can’t are used quite often. Would’ve, shouldn’t, and similar longer contractions are frequently expanded, leading to a stilted or fifth-gradian tone. This could also be an artifact of AI translation.
- misunderstanding the meaning of words (although, to be fair, I also see this frequently in romantasy titles by younger authors): My shoes donned my feet.
- the commas: Missing but grammatically necessary commas: I want to kill Robert vs I want to kill, Robert. Grammatically unnecessary and incorrect commas: I sat, with him.
Most serial reading apps, Galatea included, are the peak of redundancy and tell-don’t-show writing: They obeyed him because he was the alpha. This was because alphas are the strongest and most dominant in the pack. So everyone obeys the alphas. Because they’re strong and dominant. This is not a direct quote, but you get the picture.
Bottom line: Romance readers are notorious for their voracious reading appetite, and serial reading apps keep the content coming—albeit at a cost. In Galatea, it would cost more to purchase the coins to read a short, 30-chapter book than to purchase a self-published novel available on Amazon.
So what does Galatea offer romance readers that they can’t get from, say, Wattpad or Kindle Unlimited? My guess is that part of the appeal is easy discovery: The reading universe on Galatea is simultaneously more finite (and manageable) than KU or Amazon itself and more discoverable, with banners advertising new or popular stories, a “Because you read” recommendation section, and category searches.
The other part of the appeal is the type of content. If you get your dopamine from high-stakes, fast-paced romance (or, as BookTok freely calls it, smut) that has a low barrier to entry (so to speak), an app like Galatea caters exactly to you.
Nicole Klungle is copy editor for The Hot Sheet. She started her 30-year editing career by proofreading for the World Bank in Washington, DC, and later worked at F&W Media in Cincinnati.
