We're still working on building out our docs. If you can't find something just give us an ping: [email protected].
Also, we'd love to hear from you with any feedback or feature requests.
Patreon
Cereal is built for Patreon authors. As of today, you can only add content to Cereal via Patreon. This means you must have a Patreon account to use Cereal with your readers today. Patreon is free to use and you can get started quickly.
In the future we hope to allow building subscription services and posting content directly to Cereal.
Patreon FAQ
Reader Access (tiers)
Cereal uses the tiers you set post by post in Patreon to determine how readers get access.
We make public posts (the free to everyone option on Patreon) available to all readers in Cereal.
This means you can provide teaser chapters discoverable on Cereal by setting them to public on Patreon. You can entice the readre to upgrade to read the rest of your book.
New Posts
Cereal will automatically update within minutes of any published post.
You will have to visit Cereal when you publish, not schedule, a post to assign it to the right book within Cereal.
In the future we may offer auto-assigned posts. If this is an important feature to you let us know.
Updated Posts
When you update a post in Patreon, we will update all the information in the corresponding Cereal chapter.
Tiers, title, content etc. will be updated within minutes.
If you have different tiers set in Cereal than in Patreon, we will override with the latest setting from Patreon
Any comments for a chapter where the content of the post changed will be moved to the first paragraph of that chapter.
If you only update the tier, comments won't be affected
If you update content, we lose the ability to associate the comment with the original paragraph. Rather than risk losing comments (if the chapter is now shorter) or having comments on random paragraphs, we move them to the first paragraph.
If you have questions, concerns, or ideas about handling this I'm all ears. I think we have room for improvement here.
Why isn't my link appearing in Cereal?
Cereal scans Patreon content for malicious attacks (virus/spam/password stealing NOT censoring) and may remove links.
We offer links from your Author Profile.
Cereal
The Cereal website is built to help you organize your Patreon posts into books so that readers can access your content in an improved experience in the app.
Cereal FAQ
What is an Author Update?
For most authors, not all of their posts are chapters or comments that are meant to be included in the book's table of contents.
You might want to share updates on upcoming books, news about your channel, other announcements.
Author Updates are posts that aren't meant to be chapters. They will appear on your reader's home page and on your public author profile (but will still only be accessible for readers with the appropriate tier or status).
How do I delete a book
We're still working on adding that to the website.
No. Cereal only supports one Cereal account per Patreon account.
If you create a 2nd account and connect it to Patreon, all posts and campaign data will transfer over. However, Cereal specific data such as books and chapters will remain with the first account.
This means it's advised to use one Cereal account for both reading and writing.