Our story

It always started the same way. You are scrolling through Instagram or TikTok, and an ad stops you mid-scroll: a snippet of a story so compelling you had to read it. Then the frustration. Where is this book? What platform is it on? Is it free? Is it even in English?

We built Novelmaps because that was happening to too many readers with nowhere to turn. There was no single place to search for a web novel by the text of its ad, find which platforms carry it, and compare the ways to read it.

So we made one. Paste a line from the ad, drop a screenshot, or type what you remember, and we will tell you where that book lives across 15+ platforms.

Nobody stops at one book. Readers found the title they came for and immediately wanted to know what else was like it. That turns out to be a hard question, because these books are close to invisible. They live on apps that do not share a catalogue, they get renamed from one platform to the next, and there is no bestseller list for any of it.

The one real signal of what is popular is what the apps are spending money to advertise. So we started keeping track. Every week we collect the ads these apps are running and count which books they are pushing hardest, and that list sits on the front page. It is the closest thing we know of to a chart for indie romance and web fiction.

Every book in the catalogue was added by someone who saw an ad, tracked the book down, and wanted to make it easier for the next reader. When our search cannot identify something, readers post it and other readers recognise it.

That is the part we are proudest of, and we are just getting started.