Our philosophy

Inkweaver starts with the people who make the stories we love.

When creators can use the tools they know, get paid fairly, keep control of their IP, and spend less of their budget on production overhead, more of their energy can go into making something worth experiencing.

Inkweaver meets you where you are

Every creator has their own tools, workflows, and best practices. Inkweaver doesn’t ask you to leave any of that behind. You keep working in the tools you know, and Inkweaver puts the pieces together.

Nobody has to learn an engine first, and any creator can be productive on day one. This means a team can be built around talent, not around software.

No lock-in

Making a visual novel is a big commitment, and switching tools halfway through can be expensive. With Inkweaver, your work stays in the formats you were going to use anyway.

If you decide Inkweaver isn’t the right fit, leaving is frictionless. There’s nothing to export or untangle. Your work is exactly where any other tool asks you to start, ready for import or conversion.

Free by design

We want to find writers and artists with stories that need to be told, and removing barriers is the best way to find them.

Making a visual novel should cost what the people making it are paid, and as little as possible beyond that. That’s our goal: production costs as close to zero as we can get them, so your resources go to the story, not the tools.

To that end, Inkweaver is completely free. No subscription fees, and no royalties on what you create.

Creator-first partnerships

Beyond the tool, we produce novels. When we meet a team with the right vision, we partner with them, offering financial support, technical resources, and hands-on help with the hardest parts of production.

Our terms are the same for every partner who works with us:

• You set your rate. You tell us what your time is worth, and we never haggle your rate down. If your quote exceeds our budget, we’ll work with you on capacity and scope, never on your value.
• You’re paid in advance. Most of our work is on retainer. We pay you ahead of time for a guarantee of capacity. You’re paid whether we can fill that capacity or not. A stable, predictable income gives you the space to do your best work.
• Everyone shares in the novel’s success. Every partner shares in the revenue from the first sale. No Hollywood accounting, and no costs to recoup first. That’s on top of your pay, never in place of it.
• Your work stays yours. You keep your copyright, with every adaptation right, unencumbered: film, television, print, stage, and sequels. We license only the edition of the novel that we collaborate on.
• Bring your agent, or don’t. Our terms are standard, on a favored-nations basis, so your reps don’t need to haggle over deal points. They can help you set your rate and focus on your IP strategy instead. And if you don’t have an agent, you get exactly the same terms.
• We respect your guild. If you’re a WGA member, or belong to another guild, we won’t ask you to put your standing at risk to work with us. We work within your guild’s rules, and if a project can’t, we won’t ask you to take it on.