Tapas is closing. Another reminder not to keep your work in one place
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R. S. Breed Founder
Anime News Network reported on the 22nd that Kakao Entertainment plans to shut down Tapas. No end date has been given yet. Kakao is due to give publishers and rights holders the details.
If you've got work on Tapas, don't wait for the end date. Plenty of people won't find out until the final shutdown email, so if you know someone posting there, tell them.
This is becoming a pattern. Kindle Vella closed in February 2025. Findaway Voices closed in August 2025. Radish closed at the end of last year. Now Tapas. None of these were fly-by-night operations, and people had built real work around all of them.
And it isn't only closures. Terms change under you too. ACX moved to a new royalty model this year (50% exclusive, 30% non-exclusive, up from 40% and 25%), and the legacy model ends at the end of the year, when titles still on it have to move across or come out of distribution. If you've been ignoring that, put it in your calendar now.
Nothing wrong with using these platforms. Serial apps and audio distributors can find readers you'd never reach otherwise. The mistake is letting one of them be the only place your work and your readers exist.
The backup side of this is covered in the April thread, "Keep your own copies of everything", so I won't repeat it beyond this: if a site went dark tomorrow, could you republish within a week? If not, fix that first.
The rest, regardless of where you publish:
- Export what you can now, including comments and reader lists if the platform allows it. Don't wait for the shutdown notice.
- Give readers a way to follow you, not the platform. An email list, a simple website, something you control. Put the link where your readers will see it, in author notes, end-of-chapter notes, back matter.
- Read the emails about terms changes. The boring ones are usually the ones that cost you money.
The platforms will keep changing. The readers who know where to find you are the only part that carries over.