Fantasy Alley is a reading platform dedicated to fantasy, designed as a three-tier product: a reading app, a business API, and a catalog ingestion pipeline. The goal: bring readers, indie authors and a professional catalog together in a single ecosystem, with an active community around it.
Make three stacks and three logics coexist in one coherent product. A rich app (reader, library, marketplace, social) has to stay smooth. An API has to handle author self-publishing and moderation without becoming a bottleneck. And it has to swallow a real professional publishing feed — multi-gigabyte imports — without breaking the experience.
Three interlocking blocks. The Flutter app carries the catalog, a built-in EPUB/PDF reader with DRM, the library, the marketplace and a social network. The NestJS API (around twenty business modules, PostgreSQL, AWS Cognito) runs a self-publishing workflow for indie authors and trust-level moderation (new, validated, trusted) with fast-track. A Python/FastAPI pipeline ingests the professional catalog in ONIX 3.0 format from Dilicom, the francophone digital-book hub: around 125,000 books synced, multi-gigabyte imports tracked live over WebSocket with a REST fallback. Around it, a gamified Discord community with a virtual economy and a conversational AI bot wired to a vector database.
Product under construction. The three stacks and the professional publishing feed are in place; iteration continues with the client.