Fictionaut Joins LitSense

You may have noticed already: starting today, Fictionaut is running ads on most pages. A year after our public launch and two years after we invited the first beta testers, the time has come for the site to generate revenue in order to support itself and continue to grow.

That’s why we’ve teamed up with LitSense, a new advertising network dedicated specifically to literary websites. The ads you’ll see are for books by independent and web-savvy publishers that should — we hope — be interesting to Fictionauts. No hopping monkeys or dancing bananas here.

The money we hope to make from these ads will go toward server costs and help us keep developing the site. As you may know, Fictionaut is a custom-built application, and our to-do list of fixes and new features has grown long. We’d love to make improvements to almost every page, integrate the site better with other social networks, give more tools to group administrators, and work on offering stories in many more formats, both digital and print. We’re also looking into ways to share our revenue with Fictionaut authors. The ads will allow us to make the site work better for you and move it closer to our vision of what Fictionaut can be.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know what you think of the ads, the way they’re placed on the page, or if you ever encounter ads you find inappropriate.