Hey, want to find some web fiction sites?
Back during the early days of the pandemic, I made a list of as many web fiction sites as I could find to help readers find new stories to read (and to help writers find new places to post). The list kept expanding bigger and bigger, and now here’s the full directory for yyou.
I’ll be defining “web fiction” broadly. It includes prose stories, webcomics, and interactive browser-based fiction. As long as it’s available via a web browser or app, it’s not solely 18+, and it’s got lots of free content, I’ll list it. Lots of web fiction sites!
(I won’t include my own Quinlan Circle site, but obviously you should visit that too ;) )
Heavy-Hitter Web Fiction Sites
These are the most popular web fiction sites right now, the ones that attract the most traffic and highest-profile stories. Many really huge stories AREN’T on these sites, but a big percentage are.
Tapas
My go-to web fiction site and rapidly rising in the ranks. It has comics AND novels, unlike every single other item on the list, so that’s one big mark. So many amazing stories! The most-heavily promoted stories on the site tend to be Premium, but most are free.
Royal Road
For web novels of the fantasy or LitRPG variety, this site reigns supreme. Unlike other big web novel sites, this doesn’t even have an app, and it’s STILL huge. Other genres are well-represented here too, as long as you search them out.
Webtoon
The biggest webcomic site in the world and for good reason; it puts out countless high-quality stories every week. The user-submitted stories have major overlap with Tapas, but this site has many more originals.
Wattpad
Personally, I’m not a fan of Wattpad, but it’s the biggest web novel site and bigger than most all sites on this list combined. It’s mostly geared towards stories for teenage girls, but it does have work in all genres. It’s just hard to find due to the site’s faulty search function.
Hiveworks
The premier indie webcomic syndicate. They have some of the best webcomics in the entire business! I have to recommend my #1 favorite humor comic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
Now that you’ve gotten an introduction to the biggest web fiction sites, you might be thinking, “Gosh, that’s a lot of stuff!” My response: You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Web Fiction Sites – Novels (Primarily Western)
Top Web Fiction
Aggregate site. Vote on your favorite stories and they’ll appear on the rankings. This used to be a component of Web Fiction Guide. However, as of this writing, accounts are invite-only, so you have to know another author to upload your story listings.
Progression Fantasy & LitRPG
Aggregate site. Lists exclusively, well, progression fantasy and LitRPG books.
Tuesday Serial
Aggregate site.
ScribbleHub
Inkitt
Neovel.io
Moonquill
Fictionpress
Quotev
Penana
HoneyFeed
Muse’s Success
Aggregate site. Extremely inactive.
Fictionate.me
Spacebattles.com’s Original Fiction Section
A forum.
Sufficient Velocity’s Fiction Section
A forum.
Inkspired
Booksie
Archdale Books
Aggregate site.
aJoara
Underlined
Run by Penguin Random House.
Ritoria
Web Fiction Sites – Novels (Primarily Asian)
Novel Updates
Aggregate site.
Novel Trackr
Aggregate/News site.
Web & Light Novel Updates
Aggregate site.
Creative Novels
WuxiaWorld
Flying Lines
BoxNovel
Aggregate site.
Novel Releases
Aggregate site. Extremely inactive.
Novel Full
Aggregate site.
TapRead
KiteNovel
Aggregate site.
Web Fiction Sites – Webcomics (Primarily Western)
These are sites that exclusively feature comics. It’s actually rarer than you’d expect! Several large webcomic sites of years’ past have gone extinct, most notably Smackjeeves. Most non-webtoon comics are hosted on their own site, so aggregate sites may be the best bet.
Top Web Comics
Aggregate site. I didn’t list this site in “heavy hitters” only because it contains way too many NSFW banner ads. Also, yeah, NSFW. Vote for Starcrash though.
Comic Rocket
Aggregate site.
Comic Fury
The Duck Comics
AWA Studios
SpiderForest
Keenspot
Inkblazers
Shut down, but fully archived.
Smack Jeeves
Also shut down, but almost fully archived.
GlobalComix
Tinyview
Includes content from traditional comic publishers like Archie.
Other Aggregate Sites
Webcomics Hub (inactive?)
Collective of Heroes (superheroes)
Web Fiction Sites – Webcomics (Primarily Asian)
Tappytoon
Copin Comics
Webcomicsapp
Primarily Asian content, but has plenty of Western content too. The only one in this section that has free hosting for webcomic creators.
Lezhin
INKR
Also contains Western comics. This also contains traditional comics from Image, Kodansha, and others, so this is very non-indie.
Manta
Toomics
Voyce.me
Also has novels.
Pocket Comics
Graphite
App only.
Kross Komics
Comic Strip Sites
These sites are legacy holdovers from newspaper funny pages and feature comics under syndication. Not exactly web fiction, but it is on the web and they are free, so…
GoComics
King Features
Comics by azcentral
Fan Fiction Sites
This section is absolutely missing a ton of sites, so please let me know of any multi-fandom fan fiction sites I can add.
fanfiction.net
Archive of Our Own
AO3 actually allows original fiction as well, but it’s a bit hidden, other than monster hit Worth the Candle.
Commafull
Lunaescence
FicWad
Interactive Fiction
CYOAs, Visual Novels, Quests, etc. (either browser playable or app stories). Games start getting a little fuzzy, I know. But for the most part this only includes games with heavy text or little gameplay.
itch.io
An indie games site that is home to many different interactive fiction works, and even web novels too. A lot of games are paid but many are free too.
- books tag
- visual novel tag
- kinetic novel tag
- interactive fiction tag
- cyoa tag
- “made with twine” tag
- text based tag
- art book tag
- comics tag
- manga tag
Tales
App only.
Choice of Games
Browser or app, but browser content is limited.
Choose Your Story
Protagonize
textadventures.co.uk
Fiction.live
PlayFic
CloudNovel
ifdb
Aggregate Site.
spacebattles.com’s Quest threads
Sufficient Velocity’s Quest section
Reddit Web Fiction Forums
Some of these are very recommended for discovering new fiction! But most of these do not directly host stories; they are aggregates or discussion boards.
Not Free/App-only
These go against the spirit of web fiction since they aren’t free but I am including them anyway. There are a LOT more romance-oriented apps, especially ones that rip off Wattpad. I’d say please help me list what I’ve missed, but… the world may be better off with just these lol.
Radish
Realm
Realm is actually one of the biggest web fiction sites. It has licensed stories from IP like Doctor Who, Marvel, and Orphan Black somehow! And yet it’s very rarely mentioned in other web fiction circles. I don’t know why. (EDIT: Oh, that’s because they have transitioned away from prose and have moved into audiobooks, with the text versions as backup bonuses. I’m leaving it up though for posterity)
LovNovel
Babel Novel
Miscellaneous Web Fiction Sites
Project Gutenberg
An online archive of public domain work, mostly readable on the web. This has more stories than you could dream of (but they are usually very old).
SCP Foundation
An archive of stories and other web fiction, all set in one horror universe.
medium’s fiction category
The site medium has plenty of fiction but is mostly for nonfiction articles. Navigating and discovery is not very good.
Dreamwidth
This site certainly has fiction but too unsorted to be of much use. Same thing with sites like WordPress.com and Tumblr; they aren’t designed as fiction websites so there is no good navigation. But they are perfectly good places to host a web serial!
Agro Squerrils
This person does audio narration for many web fiction series and uploads them to Youtube.
The Submissions Grinder
…is supposed to be for finding magazines and journals to submit work to, but you can use it to find short stories and novels to read, too! Duotrope also exists but requires a subscription.
LGBT Webcomics Tagpacker List
LGBTQ+ Webserials Tagpacker List
Platypus Comix
Basically has everything, not just comics.
Fanstory
Mostly poetry.
WritersCafe
A writing community that also has stories to read.
Note: This list has intentionally left out sites commonly mentioned as scams/spammers. Peruse those at your own risk, but I highly recommend not supporting any of those sites.
So that’s the list of almost every web fiction site as of January 2021. What’s your favorite sites? What’s your least favorite? What amazing stories have you found across the internet? Let everyone know in the comments below.
And don’t forget to check out my blog posts, such as this cool one about old Pokemon card art.
You should also drop in the Interactive Fiction Database @ https://ifdb.tads.org/ – some of this links back to websites you already mentioned, but this is where I played the few Twine games I’ve experienced (because it’s linked to by Twine’s website). Also, it’s Choose Your Story, not Choose Your Own Story! (I know because I made a weird Evangelion game in there a few years back!)
Vote 🙂
Linked and fixed!
I updated this today and added more content, mainly in the webcomics section–enough to split that section into Western and Asian.
Nice collection there, Though you might want to put ‘aggregate site’ on Novelfull and Boxnovel sites. Since I have been reading Eastern Fantasy novels (East Asian novels) for quite some time. One thing I found about Boxnovel was that they had more redundant/old data like some chapters are short like chapter 1 of ‘Returning from the Immortal World novel’ unlike NovelFull with more stable and accurate chapters. But still do not remove Boxnovel cause i also found some novels that are F’ed on others sites but accurate on Boxnovel. Other site you might wanna include is Kitenovel.com (another aggregate site)/ this one in recommendation cause 2 reason; First, they somehow added ‘Automation’ or something that even if chapters are disordered, it becomes ordered on it’s own like chapter 1210 and 1100 of ‘Sweet Wife in My Arms novel and Strongest Abandoned Son novel respectively And for second: they have options to change fonts, line heights and inbuilt google translater for better readability. Though less novels as a downside but they update new novels everyday. There is one more site but gotta research on that first and i’ll try to inform you then.
Ps: Yes the chapters i mentioned are F’ed on every other site. So it was a lifesaver.
Thanks; I updated it. The primarily Asian websites aren’t my expertise so I’m not familiar with most of them.
Well It’s understandable since there are hundreds of different category/type of books out there.