An Overview of the Dreame App

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about publishing serially. I’m currently sitting on over a million words in the What Remains miniseries for Starship Valkyrie alone—a science-fiction romance set at Indoc 4 with a bunch of cyborgs in therapy. While it’s had great beta readers, and I’ve enjoyed the hell out of writing it, I want to start getting it in front of readers. The series is, however, just a lot of material, and I thought that it might do better as a weekly read on a serial reading app or some other platform. I’ve considered Medium, Substack, and WattPad (please let me know your thoughts on any of those for science fiction). Of course there’s always traditional publishing, but while I think there’s material I’ve been working on that would do well in traditional publishing (Hybrid Vigor and Crimson Tide come to mind), What Remains is a slow-burn romance in the truest sense, on top of a psychological science-fiction deep dive. I want it to find its people and the right format.

Enter Erin and her adventure in the Dreame app.

My sister, ever eager to help me and see me succeed, enthusiastically jumped on the task. I’m published in a romance anthology. What Remains is ostensibly a romance. There appear to be a plethora of exciting romance serial-publishing content apps in the world right now, delivering oodles of delicious romance and erotica into the hands of Gen-Z readers. I’m busy writing and doing marketing, and she likes smut… so she quite generously took it upon herself to try them out.

To save her from having to write it up (as she likes to tell me, Erin is a kinesiologist, not a storyteller), and to save you from jumping into Dreame if it’s not for you, I invited Erin over for coffee, budae jjigae, and an interview. Please enjoy… especially the receipts.

Please note that Dreame is not a PG13 place. It f***s hard, Anastasia.

Interview with Guest Researcher, Erin:

Q: How did you find Dreame?

A: I think I was scrolling on FB, and every once in a while an ad for something like this would come up. There’s usually a pretty picture and a teaser, and you can read a little bit of a chapter, and then you have to download the app to read the rest. This time, I figured, “My sister is looking into serial online publishing. Why not?” I’ve done Webtoon and Tapas before, so this was similar.

Q: Have you used any other prose fiction-reading apps like this one?

A: Tapas has both web comics and written stories. Some of the stories will be translated into web comics there. Those are all manhwa translations from Korean stories. Dreame seems like it’s for a North American audience specifically.

Q: What did you like about Dreame?

A: The scrolling format is really easy to get sucked into, as opposed to traditional reading apps where you click on the side to turn the page. That’s a lot of going from the top to the bottom of the page, as opposed to scrolling, where I keep my eyes in the center of the page. I lost track of how long stories were, and when you get to the end of what’s free, it’s very easy to almost auto-unlock—use credits to unlock more—or you can buy a bunch of chapter unlocks with real money ahead of time. They make that very easy, and the amount of credits have very little relationship with real money. In more popular stories, chapters are more expensive than others. That encourages you to read lesser-known stories, or save up credits to read the well-known stories. Those are things I appreciated about the business model, though I’m not sure how much I liked it. I liked that I could tell from the titles and tropes if I was going to enjoy it. Also, there’s smut right away a lot of the time, which is great. I want to know if this is a thing for me, if I like the way the smut is written. It will also suggest erotica if you like erotica, and it’s easy to tell what’s erotica and what’s not. I think maybe they should use a heat level system on Dreame; that would help.

Q: What did you not like?

A: If I want to get to the end of the book, I have no idea how much money I need to pay to get there. It’s an unknown amount of money. They’re by no means the only app that does that. The content is clearly “content,” and not novels. The chapters are not copyedited. It’s also hard to navigate how long a story is or should be when it’s finished, and you can’t pay to just buy a subscription to a whole story, which would at least guarantee that you can read the whole thing without paying an unknown quantity of money. I think they got the idea from fanfic uploads, but that’s obviously not for money. These are cheap little popcorn stories, very light, which I enjoyed; these are not the next great American novel.

A big thing: just because it’s a romance app doesn’t mean it’s okay to send me erotica on a notification. I had a few lines from a sex scene on my LOCK SCREEN. A sentence about a throbbing cock on my lock screen while I was having coffee with my mother. I don’t want to see, “F*** me, Daddy” while trying to check if it’s time to pick up my toddler. There’s a time and a place for everything. That’s one reason I deleted the app…. The notifications were getting gonzo, and I couldn’t find a way to change the notifications from NSFW to PG. It was either turn off notifications, or receive erotica to my lock screen. It was very funny… as I deleted the app.

Receipts: Erin's Lock Screen After Re-downloading the App for Mere Minutes.

Q: What tropes were prominent on the app?

A: I see a lot of situational tropes—love in difficult times, wealthy families, special girls (the Luna, the sister to some powerful guy, the babysitter to a rich man), lots of hockey player stuff (which was not something I expected), LOTS of werewolf stuff (Luna and Alpha), people getting married for contrived reasons and then falling in love. There's also a lot of biker stuff, a lot of pregnant werewolf stuff, second chances, enemies to lovers, mafia stuff, mafia engagements, billionaires, brother’s best friend… you get the drift.

Q: You mentioned Alphas and Lunas. That seems to be a thing on this app. Can you tell me more? Is that Omegaverse?

A: No, Omegaverse is over in erotica. Lunas are the soft feminine mate to the masculine Alpha; it can be a man in a gay story. I haven’t seen a sapphic version of that—no female Alphas yet. I don’t think it’s allowed. This seems to be a shared mythology/subgenre now, just like Omegaverse is. There’s a goddess of the moon who chooses a werewolf’s mate, and the Luna is the Alpha’s mate. There’s usually a claiming bite, and they trade smells… and it’s weird…. The thing that I figure is that it’s backlash against the “will-they-won’t they? dynamic. There’s no confusion here, no guilt, no regrets. These two are fated to be together; all the drama stems from that, not about whether they’ll have sex. The drama also comes from external sources that usually make no sense. There are also second-chance Luna stories, where the first Alpha rejects his Luna, and the moon goddess takes pity on her and gives her a second chance. But usually the first Alpha is the perfect man once he has found his mate—protective and powerful. I don’t really feel like the Alpha and Luna get character arcs; they usually just start fixing everything around them as a perfect power couple, and their pack is so much happier, and only jealous stupid people dislike them, and all the problems are easily solved. It’s irritating to me, personally.

Q: Would you recommend Dreame as a platform for authors?

A: If you want to be a content creator and make a little bit of money that way, and you don’t want to take that content or reputation to another platform, then yes. It’s not a place for you to develop a following or make art; the content goes there and it’s Dreame’s, so if you wanted to write a sequel, you would have to produce it through Dreame. In order to keep up with the content that people want, you don’t have time for beta readers or proper copyediting. You don’t have time to check continuity. People want to read something new every day on here, or you’re going to lose them. If you’re a baby writer and want to learn, to try something out and see what people want and what they respond to, by all means.

I don’t think it’s a great way to build your career or make a living. I don’t even think anything is likely to get big here, like on WattPad or WebToons. It’s hard to tell here who’s writing what, or follow a specific author. You can, but it’s difficult. It’s all just Dreame content, and they mean for it to be that way. People are more likely to follow a single book than the author. You can tip an author with something called a Moon Ticket, which ups their ranking. But the author of the hottest stories on the platform only has a few hundred follows, while her stories have tens of thousands. That’s a huge differential.

It's kind of like posting fanfiction—a good way to practice. Not a great way to bridge into an author career, from what I can tell.

~*~

So there you have it. Maybe Dreame isn’t for me… but it could be just the thing for you. Despite all of Erin’s disgruntled comments about it, there’s one thing I do know: when she had the thing downloaded, we all got a real kick out of her occasional, wild screenshots of her notifications. She also very much seemed to enjoy doing the research, so if you enjoy romance and you want something light and fun on your phone, check it out. I’m not being sponsored to say that or anything. I just thought I’d be fair to these people and all their authors, while giving you the perspective of one person who downloaded and used it for a while.

I think my favorite part of this adventure has been Erin trying to explain to me what a Luna is, at various interrupted intervals, while reading me the titles of several stories on Dreame. She’s certainly right that titles on Dreame are borderline postmodern in their descriptiveness, like contemporary Japanese light novels. A typical title goes like these: The Pregnant Luna Ran Away from Her Fated Mate, Second-Chance Luna, and, of course, My Best Friend’s Alpha Dad. (I’ve heard of Dad’s best friend… but best friend’s dad?) In all honesty, I think I have to both honor and admire the self-possession and comfort in one's own skin that it must take to be perfectly content with snippets of sex scenes in one's notifications. Wouldn't that be a fun moment in a romance story?

It's hard not to consider the basic fact that romance and erotica fulfill a human need both deeper and more voracious than science fiction; I have difficulty imagining a Dreame app filled with quickly generated and refreshed science-fiction content, with titles like, The Commander Makes an Unlikely Alliance with Aliens or The Space Colony Declares a War of Independence Against the Fascistic Empire of Earth, with descriptions that detail explicitly and minutely every trope available in the text. That’s not to say it might not be a fun idea… but I don’t know that readers would want, enjoy, or consume it with quite so much glee. That being said, it’s still fun to imagine.

I’m off to write Three Alien Species Mix Badly in an Orbital Den of Blackjack and Hookers, Until Space Cthulhu Rears His Ugly Head. If you see any science-fiction Dreame apps, or any romance content apps you’d like Erin to review, we’d love to hear about them. She does love her some smut. 😊

United and Strong!