Disclosure: I've been an early voice in the room while Voluta was being built, and Samantha is a friend. This is not a sponsored post, but you should know I am not a neutral reviewer. The honesty rules still apply and the critiques in this post are real.

Your TBR is in five places right now.

Half of it is on Goodreads, where you haven't logged a book in eighteen months. Some of it migrated to StoryGraph and then never got touched again. There are screenshots in your camera roll from BookTok, a Notes app list called "TBR," and a group chat from 2023 where your best friend still sends you recs you swear you'll get to.

None of it talks to each other.

If that sentence made you feel seen, you're the reason Voluta exists. And I have an exclusive interview with the woman who built it.

Samantha Seeley is a Product Manager by day, a romantasy reader and serial slump-haver by night, and the founder of Voluta— a new cross-media tracking app launching with books first. She built it on nights and weekends during a five-month reading slump caused by finishing the entire sixteen-book Sarah J. Maas universe. The irony of building a reading app while unable to read is not lost on her.

I was an early voice in the room while Voluta was being built, so I'm not exactly a neutral reviewer here. What I am is a reader who has spent a long time wanting this specific app to exist, watched it actually get built, and now uses it as my real book-tracking home. I migrated my Goodreads library three weeks ago. I have opinions about the rating system. I have notes.

Let's get into it.

📖 Become a Voluta Founding Member →

The Reading Slump That Built the Reading App

This is the part of the story I cannot get over.

Samantha spent five months in a slump caused by finishing the SJM universe. (If you've finished House of Flame and Shadows and then stared at your TBR like it was a stranger, you know exactly what kind of slump this is.) Brimstone sat on her Kindle stand from December 2025 until last week. Five months of her kindle staring her down every night.

And in the middle of that slump, she built Voluta.

"There's a real irony in the fact that the reading slump built the reading app. I couldn't read, so I built the thing I wished I'd had when I could."

The specific moment she went from complaining about Goodreads to actually building Voluta was this: she tried to make herself a TBR that would get her out of the slump. She had screenshots, a half-started spreadsheet, a Notes app list, and three group chats with friends sending her recs. She sat down to consolidate it all by hand and went wait. This is the product. Not the consolidation. The fact that I'm doing the consolidation by hand in 2026.

She's a PM. She knows how to scope. So She built the thing.

📖 Reading doesn't happen in a straight line. You spiral outward, one book recommends the next, one genre opens into another, one author leads you to the four she's been comped to. That's where the name Voluta comes from.

What Voluta Does Differently

Half stars. They exist. It’s a petty hill, but a real one.

Goodreads is a fifteen-year-old product owned by Amazon and they refuse to give us half stars. As Samantha put it:

"That's not a technical decision, that's an institutional shrug. A four-star book and a three-star book are not in the same universe. A three-point-five is doing real cognitive work. It's the difference between 'good but I won't reread' and 'actually really good but the ending got me.' We deserve the granularity."

I migrated three weeks ago and the rating system has been one of my favorite things. I went through and corrected several books I'd previously had to round on Goodreads. It felt like cleaning out a drawer. Instant contentment.

Spoiler-gated discussions. This is the feature I've wanted in a reading app for years.

Every review and discussion post on Voluta is tagged with a spoiler level. No spoilers, up to chapter X, or full book. You set your own progress per book, and the app only shows you posts at or below that level. Conversations above your threshold appear as locked stubs, you can see that the conversation exists, you just haven't earned it yet.

The insight is simple: spoilers are a function of progress, not preference. The app already knows what book you're reading. It has no business making you guard your own eyeballs.

If you've ever bitten your tongue in a book club group chat because half the group hasn't finished this changes everything. You can finally just talk about it.

Import from Goodreads AND StoryGraph. The friction that has kept readers stuck on Goodreads for a decade is gone. Drop your CSV in, go make yourself a coffee, and come back to your entire reading life in one place.

You can pause books. You can DNF them properly. Small features with surprisingly emotional payoff. I had several books that I wanted neither to be "currently reading" forever nor to mark as finished. Voluta lets me park them honestly.

Cross-media is coming. Books first, then shows, movies, and games. The long vision is one app for everything you read, watch, and play.

What's Not There Yet (My Honest Thoughts)

Voluta is a V1. It's beautiful and considered and shipping the things that matter most, but a few real cuts I noticed migrating:

No reading session timer at launch. Start-a-timer-and-track-minutes is the retention loop a few competitors are shipping. It didn't make V1. Coming post-launch, but if you live and die by your daily reading minutes, it's not here yet.

Audiobook tracking is bundled, not separate. Audio listens currently fold into book records. Dedicated audiobook format with distinct time and pages mapped is one of the most-requested features and is shipping post-launch.

No barcode scanner yet. The "scan the back of a physical book to add it to your library" feature is on the public roadmap, not yet live. Right now you add by search.

The community is forty-one people deep. That number is climbing fast, but if you're migrating expecting a Goodreads-sized social graph on day one, recalibrate. This is more like joining a really good Discord in month one. Get in early, help shape it.

None of these are dealbreakers. They're V1 cuts from a solo founder shipping a real product on a real timeline. I'd rather use a thoughtful V1 of a tool built by someone who actually reads than a feature-bloated tool built by someone who doesn't. Every interaction in Voluta feels like someone thought about it. That care and and understanding of what readers want is what sets Voluta apart.

Samantha Seeley Founder of Voluta

Meet Samantha

The other reason I wanted to write this post is that Samantha is genuinely the person you want building your reading app.

She's a Product Manager at an ad-tech company by day. Seven years of shipping other people's ideas. At some point, as she put it, you just go: okay. My turn.

She built Voluta on nights and weekends. Her husband Joe, an electrician who is learning software development on the side, has been in the engine room with her more than he's been in the beta. When I asked Samantha about him, she said:

"He's been the steadiest believer in the project from day one, which is the part that actually matters."

Her twelve-year-old husky Penny is the unofficial mascot.

photo of twelve-year-old husky Penny

"She doesn't have opinions on my book choices so much as she has opinions on whether I should be reading at all when there's clearly a more important option, which is petting her. She's been the steady presence next to every late-night coding session for the entire build. If Voluta has a mascot, it's her."

Samantha is a beverage goblin. Direct quote: "Water, iced tea, soda, seltzer. One for hydration, one for energy, and one just for fun. That's a quote, I don't know who coined it, but it's law in this house now."

She will die on the Nesta hill. ACOSF is her favorite ACOTAR. "People wanted Feyre and Rhys forever and instead they got Nesta being prickly and self-destructive and slow to heal, and the internet decided that meant she was a bad character instead of a real one. She's grieving, she's angry, she's making bad decisions, she's been through war. That's not unlikeable. That's a person."

And she will absolutely sell you on Crescent City:

"Bryce is my girl. Hunt is my man. If you haven't read CC, you're missing out. That's the hill."

She doesn't reread, despite building an app that lovingly supports rereaders, because there are too many books she hasn't met yet. "The TBR is the comfort."

When I asked her what kind of reading community she does NOT want Voluta to become, she said: the dogpile. The review-bombing. The author-harassment-pile-on. The performative one-star wars. "Voluta is for readers to talk to other readers about what they're reading. It's not a stage for performance, and it's not a venue for organized takedowns. I'm building the moderation policy to be clear about that from day one."

If you have ever loved a reading community and watched it turn, you understand how much that intention matters.

Why You Want to Be Here Now

Voluta is running a Founding Member program. The cliff is real.

If you sign up before the program closes, you get:

  • Lifetime access to every premium feature Samantha ever ships. Forever. No fine print. Every paid feature in year one, year three, year ten all included.
  • A gold Founding Member badge on your profile. It closes when the program closes. You cannot buy this later. Either you were here at the beginning or you weren't.

The lifetime access is the headline. But here's the part that actually matters: everyone who signs up after the program closes will pay a subscription. Forever. Every premium feature, on a recurring bill. You don't have to. Three minutes to import, sixty seconds of consolidation, lifetime of premium for free.

The badge is the heart. It's a small thing that says you were here when the about page had typos, when she was DMing you at 11pm about your bug report, when there were forty-one of us.

What your reading life looks like 30 days from now if you do this:

  • All your books in one place. Goodreads + StoryGraph + Notes + screenshots, all merged.
  • Half-star ratings on every book in your history.
  • Spoiler-gated discussions for the next book your club picks.
  • A buddy read going with at least one friend who also migrated.
  • A reading goal you can actually track.
  • A community that's small enough to feel like home and growing fast enough to surprise you.

What your reading life looks like if you don't:

  • Still in five places. Still abandoned Goodreads. Still meaning to switch.
  • Paying for Voluta premium in six months when you finally cave, instead of free forever.
  • No gold badge.

Go.

📖 Become a Voluta Founding Member →

A Buddy Read, Because Samantha Asked

When I asked Samantha which book she'd recommend every Voluta founding member read this summer, she said:

"Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune. It caught my eye at Barnes and Noble the other day and has been sitting in my brain ever since. If we're founding members together, let's read it at the same time via buddy read and compare notes in a spoiler-gated discussion."

So here's the open invitation. If you've signed up for Voluta as a founding member, we are reading Our Perfect Storm together this summer. Follow me in the app. Follow Samantha in the app. We will invite you to join the group! Start the buddy read.

I think Our Perfect Storm is Carley Fortune's best book since Every Summer After. (And if you haven't read Every Summer After yet the Prime Video adaptation premieres June 10. Full pre-adaptation guide coming to the blog this week.)

Reading it inside Voluta, with half-star ratings and spoiler-gated discussions, is going to be the most fun I've had with a book club app in a long time!

📖 Buy Our Perfect Storm  | Buy on Bookshop.org | 🎧 Listen on Audible

Where to Find Voluta and Samantha

And if you sign up today come find me in the app. I'll see you in the spiral!

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Voluta?

Voluta is a new book-tracking app launching in 2026, built as a Goodreads and StoryGraph alternative. It offers half-star ratings, spoiler-gated discussions, easy imports from both Goodreads and StoryGraph, and a cross-media roadmap that will eventually include shows, movies, and games. Founded by Samantha Seeley.

How is Voluta different from Goodreads and StoryGraph?

Voluta's key differentiators are half-star ratings, spoiler-gated discussions where post visibility is determined by your declared reading progress, support for pausing and DNF'ing books cleanly, and a cross-media long vision that includes shows, movies, and games. It imports from both Goodreads and StoryGraph in about 60 seconds.

Who founded Voluta?

Samantha Seeley, a Product Manager who built Voluta in her spare time during a five-month reading slump caused by finishing the sixteen-book Sarah J. Maas universe.

What is the Voluta Founding Member program?

Founding Members who sign up before the program closes receive lifetime access to every premium feature Voluta ever ships, plus an exclusive gold Founding Member badge on their profile. The badge cannot be obtained after the program closes. After the program closes, premium features become a subscription.

Can I import my Goodreads or StoryGraph library to Voluta?

Yes. Voluta imports from both Goodreads and StoryGraph in about 60 seconds via CSV upload.

Does Voluta support audiobooks?

Audiobook tracking is bundled into book records at launch. Dedicated audiobook format support — with distinct time tracking and audio-specific metrics — is shipping post-launch as one of the most-requested features.

When does Voluta launch on the App Store?

The App Store version is shipping imminently as of May 2026. The web version is live at voluta.app.