Hello, world. And welcome to SageChimp.com.
I've been sitting here trying to figure out how to start this post. Most "Hello World" posts from founders go one of two ways. There's the breathless kind, full of words like "transformative" and "reimagined" and "frictionless," where someone describes their app as if they have personally solved a problem that has plagued humanity since the dawn of civilization. Then there's the overly humble kind, where someone spends eight paragraphs explaining what they are not before getting around to what they are.
I'm going to try for a third option, which is to just tell you what this place is and why I built it.
What SageChimp Is
SageChimp is a book platform. It's a place for readers to discover, track, and talk about books, and a place for authors to reach the readers who will actually love their work.
If you've ever used Goodreads, you have a sense of what that means. Goodreads has been the dominant book platform for over fifteen years. It also hasn't changed in any meaningful way for most of that time. The recommendations are famously bad. The interface looks like something from 2009, because most of it is. The mobile app has been broken in small ways for so long that people have accepted it as normal.
StoryGraph came along a few years ago and did some genuinely good work, especially on the reading stats and mood-tracking side. But it's still primarily a tracking app. The community features are thin.
SageChimp is trying to be something more complete. Here's what that looks like in practice.
For Readers
When you sign up, the first thing you'll do is take a short reading preferences survey. What genres do you read? What themes do you love? Do you want fast-paced plot-driven stories or slow character studies? Name a few books you've genuinely loved. It takes about three minutes.
From those answers, SageChimp builds a taste profile for you and uses it to recommend books. Every recommendation comes with a plain-English explanation of why it was chosen for you specifically. Not "because you rated this 4 stars" but something that actually makes sense. As you read, rate, and review books on the platform, the recommendations get sharper.
Beyond recommendations, you get the full tracking suite. Shelves, reading progress, annual goals, streaks, stats. You can import your entire Goodreads or StoryGraph library in a few clicks, so you're not starting from scratch.
There's also a community worth being part of. Forums organized by genre and topic. User blogs that are indexed by search engines, so your writing reaches people beyond the platform. Fan fiction with a proper tagging system and content ratings. Book clubs. An events directory for signings and festivals. Achievement badges because some of us are wired to enjoy that kind of thing and there's no shame in it.
And there are ARCs. Advance Reader Copies. Free early access to upcoming books, matched to your taste profile. If you see an ARC in your feed, it's there because the platform thinks you'll actually enjoy it. You're welcome to leave a review, but it's not required.
For Authors
I'm an author. That matters here, because it means I built this platform with firsthand knowledge of how thoroughly most platforms fail the people who write the books.
Reaching readers is hard. It has always been hard, but the landscape of self-publishing has made it simultaneously more possible and more overwhelming than at any previous point in history. There are more books, more platforms, more noise. The standard advice, build a mailing list, run ARC campaigns, do cross-promotions, blog consistently, is all good advice. It also requires you to maintain five or six separate paid subscriptions and learn five or six different tools, none of which talk to each other.
SageChimp puts most of that in one place.
ARC campaigns work by uploading your book, setting how many copies to distribute, and letting the platform match it against reader profiles. The readers who get notified are the ones whose taste profiles fit your book. Not just "they read fantasy" but a genuinely close match to the specific kind of story you've written. Every copy is automatically watermarked with the reader's username, which protects against piracy without any extra steps on your part.
Free eBook campaigns work the same way, without the review expectation. Useful for building readership around a series, or getting your work into the hands of readers who wouldn't otherwise find you.
The newsletter tool lets you email your subscribers directly from the platform. No Mailchimp account required. Your list is always exportable if you want to move it elsewhere.
There's a built-in blog with a proper rich-text editor. Write a post, publish it, and it shows up in your followers' feeds and gets indexed by search engines. If you already have a blog on WordPress or Substack, you can link your RSS feed and your content will surface here without you having to repost it.
There's a Launch Pad section that spotlights debut and emerging authors, so new voices don't get buried under established ones from day one.
And you keep full reader functionality on the same account. You can track your own reading, participate in forums, and be part of the community, because authors are readers too, and the artificial separation between those two identities never made much sense to me.
What Comes Next
SageChimp is new. There will be things that don't work perfectly. There will be features that are missing and features that exist but need to be better.
I've put up a welcome post in the forums with a getting started guide for both readers and authors. If you have questions, start there. If you find something broken, the Feedback category in the forums is the right place. I read everything.
This is the beginning of something. I'm glad you're here for it.
Ryan