Introducing Chapterly FM: Stories You Can’t Stop Hearing

Some stories you read. Some you can’t put down. And some you end up listening to in the car outside your own house, engine off, because the episode isn’t over and you need to know whether he actually said what you think he said. That last kind is what we built Chapterly FM for. It’s a new home for serialized audio drama: full casts, a cliffhanger at the end of every episode, and whole seasons waiting for you. You can start listening today at chapterly.com/fm, and the first episodes of every series are free.

What Chapterly FM is

Chapterly FM is a listening app for serial stories. Each series is told in short episodes, most of them the length of a commute or a long bath, and each one ends on a moment that makes the next one feel urgent. A rival walks in. A letter turns up. Someone says a name they shouldn’t know.

These aren’t audiobooks with one narrator reading a novel aloud. They’re audio dramas. Every character has their own voice, scenes play out in dialogue and sound, and the story moves the way a good TV episode moves: in, conflict, turn, out, before you’ve had a chance to get comfortable.

Every series launches with whole seasons out, so you can binge as far as you like, and new episodes and new series keep arriving. Follow a series and you’ll know the moment its next chapter is in.

Why audio drama, and why serials

People have been gathering around serialized stories for a very long time. Scheherazade survived the One Thousand and One Nights by stopping each story at dawn, right before the good part. Victorian readers waited for the next monthly installment of a Dickens novel. Families in the 1930s and ‘40s planned their evenings around radio serials, and the soap opera got its name from the soap companies that sponsored those daytime radio dramas.

Audio drama is the form that never really went away. It just needed somewhere convenient to live. Listening fits into the parts of the day where reading doesn’t: driving, folding laundry, walking the dog, lying in the dark trying not to look at a screen. And a serial, built on cliffhangers and released steadily, gives you the particular pleasure of a story you’re living alongside rather than finishing in one sitting.

We think there’s room for a place built entirely around that pleasure. Not a podcast feed you have to manage, not a single long audiobook, but a shelf of stories designed to be listened to one irresistible episode at a time.

The stories

If you like your fiction with stakes, yearning, and at least one person keeping a secret, you’ll feel at home. Chapterly FM launches with series across the genres listeners can never get enough of:

• Romance, from slow-burn to second chances, where the tension in a single line of dialogue can carry an entire episode.

• Werewolf and shifter romance, with fated mates, rejected mates, pack politics and alphas who are not nearly as in control as they think.

• Billionaire romance, with glass towers, contracts that aren’t what they seem and heroines who refuse to be impressed.

• Mafia romance, where loyalty is a matter of life and death and every family dinner is a negotiation.

• Fantasy, with courts, curses, crowns and the occasional dragon.

• Hidden heir stories, in which the overlooked waitress, the disowned son or the girl raised by the wrong family turns out to be the one everyone should have been watching.

Each series has a clear hook from its first minute. You’ll know within an episode whether it’s for you, which is exactly how it should be.

Finding your first story

If you’re not sure where to start, browse by genre, or by mood if you know how you want the night to feel: swoony, tense, a little dangerous. Every series opens with its premise up front, so you can tell in a sentence or two whether it’s your kind of trouble.

Our advice: play the first episode of two or three different series back to back. One of them will end on a line you can’t leave alone. That’s your show. Follow it, and you’ll know the moment a new episode is out.

And don’t worry about falling behind. Serials are made for catching up. Whether you find a series on its first night or its two-hundredth, the story starts at episode one and waits for you.

What listening is like

We spent a long time on the small things that make listening feel good, because those are the things you notice every night.

Read along with every line

Every episode comes with its transcript, so you can follow the dialogue line by line as it plays. It’s useful when you’ve missed a name, when you want to know how someone spells the villain’s surname, or when you’re somewhere you can only listen with one ear. Some listeners read along the whole way through; it turns out hearing and seeing a confession at the same time makes it land twice as hard.

See the moments everyone reacted to

When something big happens, you can react with a gasp, a swoon, a laugh or a groan. Those reactions show up along the episode’s waveform, so you can see where the crowd lost it, and where your friends did too. There’s a special kind of fun in watching a counter tell you that a big moment is about two minutes away and trying to guess what it is.

At the points where a story plants a mystery, you can also call it: make your guess about who did it, who’s lying or who’s really in charge, then see how everyone else called it once the reveal arrives.

Pick up exactly where you left off

Come back to a story after a couple of days and Chapterly FM reminds you of the last line you heard before it carries on. No scrubbing back and forth trying to find your place, and no accidentally starting the episode you already finished.

Sleep timer and speed

Lots of people listen in bed. Set the sleep timer and the story fades out when you want it to, not three episodes later. You can also change playback speed for the dialogue-heavy stretches or slow it down when every word matters.

Downloads

In the Chapterly FM apps you’ll be able to download episodes and listen offline, for flights, subways and anywhere the signal gives up halfway through a cliffhanger.

Listening parties

Stories are better shared. Start a listening party, send the invite, and your friends hear the episode with you, in sync, with everyone’s reactions popping up as you go. It’s the closest thing to watching a season finale on the same couch when you’re in different cities.

How free listening works

We want you to fall for a story before you spend a cent on it, so free listening is generous.

• The first episodes of every series are free. Press play and find out if you’re hooked.

• A free account adds 30 free minutes a day. Sign up and you get half an hour of listening every day, on top of the free episodes, to keep going on whatever you’re into.

• Coins unlock more. When you want to binge past your free minutes, coins let you unlock episodes and keep them.

Your coins and unlocked episodes belong to your Chapterly account, not to a device, so they follow you wherever you sign in.

FM Plus

For people who listen most nights, there’s FM Plus, a membership available monthly or yearly that you can cancel at any time. At a high level, members get:

• Coins every night they listen

• New episodes a day before everyone else

• A free hour a day on every show

• A weekly bonus scene from the shows they follow

• Listening parties their friends can join free

The details, including current pricing, live on the FM Plus page. If you just want to try a story, you don’t need it. If you find yourself checking for tonight’s episode at 9 p.m. sharp, it’s probably for you.

Where to listen

Chapterly FM is live on the web right now at chapterly.com/fm. It works in the browser on your phone, tablet or computer, with nothing to install.

The Chapterly FM apps for iPhone and Android are coming soon. When they arrive, your account, coins, unlocks and place in every story will be right there waiting.

A note for Chapterly’s writers

If you’ve been writing on Chapterly, you might be wondering what this means for you. The short version: nothing about your studio, your stories or your readers changes. Chap, story boards, covers, chapter-by-chapter publishing and reader memberships all work exactly as they did yesterday.

What’s new is that you’re welcome on the listening side too, and we’d encourage you to spend some time there. Audio serials are a masterclass in some of the hardest parts of the craft: getting into a scene late, ending a chapter on a turn rather than a summary, and making every line of dialogue earn its place. Listen to a few episodes with the transcript open and notice where the story cuts, what the last line of each episode does, and how quickly each series establishes what its main character wants.

If you write serial fiction yourself, our guide to writing a story in episodes goes deeper on structure, cliffhangers and release schedules.

Press play

The best way to understand Chapterly FM is to try one episode. Pick the genre you’d read at 1 a.m. against your better judgment, put your headphones in, and see whether you can stop at the end.

We’re betting you can’t. Start listening at chapterly.com/fm.