Make money turning your short fiction... into a video game?

Are you tired of getting your short stories rejected by literary magazines with weird names like Ploughshares, The Paris Review, and, lol, The New Yorker? Do you, a writer of a searing, minimalist narratives of longing and loss amid the ruins of late capitalism, need to eat? 

Sure you do! Well, now you can turn your 5,000-word story about a self-loathing gentrifier whose life falls apart in the wake of an ill-considered affair into SHEER PROFIT. Dorian (not kidding) is a “no-code interactive storytelling app” that allows writers to turn their little stories into choose-your-own-adventure games. Per Tech Crunch:

Dorian is building a new way for writers to make money off of their fiction by turning their tales into choose-your-own-adventure mobile games. As users navigate the free-to-play app, they can spend in-app currency to unlock alternative story routes, directly putting a cut of the payment in the author’s pocket.

The app is definitely pitched toward writers of fan-fiction and genre, but there are no rules against, say, an MFA grad trying it out. As co-founder and CEO Julia Palatovska points out (telling an all-too familiar truth): “The majority of creators on the platform have been writing fiction and fan fiction for years, and they have never monetized anything.”

Sigh.