A tool like this would be perfect for school English classes or creative writing workshops (and alumni).
As for making the rest of us plebs pick up the pen again... It's a little harder than just giving us nice tools. Many aspiring writers (not all!) like to hide their work away until they are absolutely certain they will get good feedback, while this is like running around naked in the front yard.
Soundcloud has a similar 'get creating' premise and magically minimises that fear of failure factor. I'm not sure how, but it's amazing. The line between supportive and vicious is grey, blurry, narrow. Take care.
And I hear you can support the capitalist system by buying shirts with Che Guevara's face on them. Or perhaps referencing equal parts Ayn Rand, Hemmingway, Poe and Cervantes might be more of an attempt to bring to mind famous authors rather than objectivism?
No, it's like using a picture of a circle, a triangle, a square and a swastika to suggest "famous shapes." And of course, Godwin's law and all that on you.
The logical convolutions you have to go through to make Ayn Rand into Hitler are absurd. Marxism has easily killed ten times that number, many by accident, many intentionally, yet few hold Marx personally responsible or would find his face a repugnant symbol of death.
You're allowing your opinion of an ideology to turn it into nazism, but in so doing you must overlook what makes nazism unique: that it does indeed advocate murdering people simply for being different as a solution to problems—and that it actually did murder millions of people directly. Ayn Rand did not do any of that. At worst, she advanced a philosophy whose overzealous application by unscrupulous people with power led to deaths. If that's enough to make you Hitler, nearly every philosopher or novelist is, or would be if they were simply famous enough.
In short: calm down. She's included in the image because her novels are in the 100 Most Influential List put out by some non-profit. Not because she was a saint.
>yet few hold Marx personally responsible or would find his face a repugnant symbol of death.
You obviously don't live in America!
By the way, telling someone to "calm down" makes you a douchebag.
And strawmen don't help either.
And let's not kid ourselves: she's in the image because someone in that company is an Ayn Rand fan. There is no shortage of Randists among tech people. Quite a bit fewer among literary types for obvious reasons.
Newsflash: Individuals who create stuff put their favorite things in the stuff they create.
It says a lot about your intelligence that you immediately jump to a worldwide conspiracy theory from a single instance of a single individual putting his personal favorite author in a logo for a writing website.
That is not how most people are going to interpret that image. It comes across as completely clueless, since Rand is both a notoriously terrible writer and someone who would absolutely abhor the idea of collaborative writing, not to mention the idea of giving someone money.
Though I think you may be jumping the gun on how "most people" are going to interpret 1/4th of an image, it's important to note that the full PenFM project is also built to accomodate single-author works that may or may not be the best quality writing.
I just watched the video. It shows a few people typing with each other online (in this case working together on a collaborative story), a picture being dropped down near the end, and then it being posted to Facebook.
I understand that the product is the software that allows them to do this but it's not clear to me what unique features are being offered that make it superior to the IM programs and forums people have already been writing collaboratively on for years. What am I missing?
Yeah, the video was designed in a way to capture the experience rather than the tech. What isn't fully exposed:
- what you see is what you get. whenever you want, you can download the story in epub, mobi, or pdf format. while you might have to pay initially, you keep the story itself for any future download at each stage of its development in any format.
- writing is in realtime. you can see what others write, google doc style.
- content discovery is an enormous sell point here. you can write in gdocs all you want, but will just anyone be able to find and read and comment on it? we make stories accessible to the entire future pen.fm community to share and enjoy.
- we can update you on stories that you've subscribed to, to let you know anything from the fact that it's updated, or the section added itself.
- does anyone really enough shuffling back and forth between word/gdocs, chat, and forums?
Thanks for that, I get it better now. Writing with this isn't something that interests me personally, but I hope it is funded because I reckon watching other people do it in a "spectator" mode would be pretty entertaining!
My brother actually conceived a somewhat similar idea several years ago, but I figured it wouldn't be worth the effort to code and I'm not sure I even knew what technology would be necessary.
If I understand correctly, the idea here is to replace writing workshops. Instead of writing a draft, bringing it in and waiting while your peers read it and mark it up, it's all realtime. I suppose the thinking here is that if you make the whole thing fun and social people will do more of it, or perhaps by making it interactive it will be faster and you won't go as far with a bad concept, or something.
It's a cool idea, but it still strikes me as too expensive to build for what you're getting. And I think you get better writing out of putting in time and thought. But the amateur market is probably a lot bigger than the professional market, so maybe it doesn't matter.
What do you mean exactly by "too expensive to build"? I taught myself how to code a year ago, and I managed to build a pretty complete platform in a month.
To put this in some other perspective as well, I started a similar startup Neovella two years ago, before I knew how to code. It was entirely the collaborative writing side of things--no reader feedback or anything. The community grew pretty well, and we published 4 anthologies of short stories from it. The experience was awesome and unexpectedly amusing. My engineering team (1 man with a full-time job, working for free) couldn't keep up with bug fixes and features requests, and so it kind of withered away and died... but Neovella still receives users to this day who hope to find something other than a ghost town so they can continue to write in a community. I sent out an email to my former users telling them about PenFM, and the feedback overwhelmed me. People loved the product and were entirely supportive, and replied as such, even if they didn't have the means to donate anything. That's more of why I'm doing it. Also because I'm finally able to code it up all on my own, and not let down my user-base anymore.
I mean it in a couple of ways. Personally, it was too expensive to build because I simply couldn't see spending the time to do it. Part of that (for me) was that it was 2006 and I just didn't know what technology I'd need to invent or find that would do it. There was mod_pubsub and BOSH, and both were kind of a pain, and that's obviously not what they're planning on using.
The second way is just the perennial question of how is it going to pay the bills. Amateur writers… does that sound like a demographic where everybody has an extra $5/month for your service? Could be, but I'm not quite naive enough to try it and find out. I'm not really a "startup guy" though (I'm here for the articles and the conversation), some people who are less risk-averse seem tempted to try; maybe they'll get rich, it's impossible to predict.
Actually your experience illustrates perfectly what I might mean by too expensive to build, don't you think? You and one guy on the side and you couldn't keep up—you may be tempted to find a scapegoat in yourself, your team or your code but frankly nearly every project needs more developers and more time. This is your hobby now, so you know that you can lavish a couple hours a week on something indefinitely, but you've probably also noticed that boring bug fixes are hard to get motivated to do when you only have an hour left in the day and want to do something fun.
Anyway, kudos to you for learning to code, and I'm sorry to hear your project withered. Sounds to me like you did the right thing here.
I have a few months of runway. My previous engineer was my dad, and didn't have a sense of urgency about it. I have a month or two of runway now, and every time there's a bug to fix, that bug is the most important thing ever--because until it's fixed, I'm not delivering my users the experience they deserve. They could be elsewhere, doing something else.
Neovella withered not for lack of interest--it withered because it was spec'd out by an idea person straight out of school with an economics degree, and engineer who insisted on building everything in C# :)
I think SignalR and WebApi would be perfectly suited to this type of project, @neoveller. Add some KnockoutJS and host in on Azure for the total package - all for free with BizSpark. Anyhow, I'm being slightly facetious, but you really can't blame the tech stack :)
Because when you're bootstrapped and can't buy a 3 letter dotCom for $55/year, FM doesn't look so bad. So we're working with it, and kind of playing with the slogan "broadcast lit".
Broadcast lit can actually work for what you're wanting to sell this as, so I'll give you that point. But where are you looking that ended up with a $55/yr TLD? Unless you're bootstrapping from absolutely nothing, that's an investment worth making imo.
Not dismissing your product here, as a journalism nerd I think it's a novel concept and approach.
Indeed I am bootstrapping from basically nothing. I have this horrible tendency to leave a job right when I have just a few months of runway. It really puts my feet to the fire :)
pen.com is going to fet a pretty penny, I imagine in the higher 10,000s if not more. With funding, it becomes feasible. And to correct myself, FM domains cost $79/year not 55, so that's where I am. Got lucky in finding the short name.
For one, google docs has a free-form dynamic that doesn't really prevent people from cannibalizing each other's work. PenFM, like its predecessor Neovella, enforces a turn-based writing collaboration. But that's entirely just in terms of how it differs from GDocs in the sense of sharing the production of content.
Collaboration in PenFM happens in another, more powerful way: the ability to react to parts of a story with simple likes and more thorough commenting. Imagine having written a story, and now you have to send it out to friends & peers to review and give feedback on. Would you really rather have a back-and-forth over IM, constantly having to find the part they're referring to? On PenFM, they just click the section, type a comment, and you get notified to go take a look at what they wrote. It's asynchronous.
For one, google docs has a free-form dynamic that doesn't really prevent people from cannibalizing each other's work.
Not sure what you mean by "prevent people from cannibalizing each other's work", given you can very easily share docs and disable edit features at the user and group level but still allow people to read changes as they happen
An online writers' workshop--not the same as Google Docs. There are online subscription systems that support such activities, such as http://sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com/ Getting decent feedback is a problem. Perhaps there is a workable system that would compensate good reviewers. Most writers aren't rich, but they might be willing to pay other writers (who aren't rich) to review their work.
My website, Scribophile, has been doing this successfully for about 5 years now. It looks like it's solving a different problem than pen.fm though. While Scribophile concentrates entirely on craft and workshopping, it looks like pen.fm is more of a marketing/publishing/writing platform.
You sound like you really understand the pain-points pretty well, and while we have a few ways we're considering solving this one, I would love to pick your brain about it. Would you mind shooting me an email at mike@pen.fm?
A tool like this would be perfect for school English classes or creative writing workshops (and alumni).
As for making the rest of us plebs pick up the pen again... It's a little harder than just giving us nice tools. Many aspiring writers (not all!) like to hide their work away until they are absolutely certain they will get good feedback, while this is like running around naked in the front yard.
Soundcloud has a similar 'get creating' premise and magically minimises that fear of failure factor. I'm not sure how, but it's amazing. The line between supportive and vicious is grey, blurry, narrow. Take care.