This Startup Is Transforming the Self-Publishing Industry
Technology advancement and the Internet have transformed the publishing industry significantly. The introduction of e-books, digital reading products, and audiobooks created new opportunities for book fans not only to read books right from their pocket but also to write and self-publish books.
Although book sales have shrunk in recent years, the book market is projected to reach close to 124 billion by 2025. Most of this comes due to the growing number of self-publishers and the massive adoption of new platforms for digital products. According to the latest report from ProQuest affiliate Bowker, self-publishing grew at a rate of more than 28% in 2017. The total number of self-published titles grew from 786,935 to 1,009,188, surpassing the million mark for the first time. (Forbes)
Along with the most popular self-publishing platforms like iBook, Kindly, CreateSpace, new startups are coming to the scene offering advanced technology solutions to expand self-publishers.
This Armenian-based startup ForgeFiction offers a new platform for book fans to write and self-publish books. On ForgeFictions the book fans have the ability not only to write and publish books but also to share the chapters, build community collaboration, and contribute to their favorite fictions. “Like geeks or friends of fiction and fantasy, book fans are forging fiction together,” told the Co-Founder of ForgeFiction Areg Vardanyan on HyeTech Minds Podcast.
From a book fan to a contributor
Game of Thrones and Star Wars started off as a series of books and turned into successful TV shows that have been dominating screens for the last decades. They have created a real fever spread among millions of fans across the globe.
But, not all fans have been happy with how both those trilogies have been filmed and released. A lot of disappointment happened.
One of those fans was Hrach, the Co-Founder of ForgeFiction.
His disappointment was so much that he decided to build a collaborative platform for book fans. On this platform, users come together as a community and get the ability to directly contribute to the creation of full length, fictional novels, and complete stories, complete words are all around them by combining their creativity, different sets of skills, and talent.
This is actually democratizing the publishing industry and giving the voice directly to fans. Instead of one person who is just at the top of the company and not even a fan, the decision-making process is up to the community and people who are actually into this story.
How It works
ForgeFiction is a completely free platform for all creators who are ready to dedicate their creativity and time commitment to fiction. The catch here is that as a book fan you don’t have started writing a book. You can simply join the existing community based on your interests.
Using an algorithm search, users can sort their preferences and interests by trending books, new books, obviously tags, and some genres. At the same time, when the users create writing groups, the ForgeFiction platform automatically recommends the correct people to invite to those groups depending again on the generosity.
Interaction among community members is the key to this startup. Feedbacks and comments can generate conversation. Through a server called Discord, the users have the ability to create writing communities, interact with each other, and work jointly on the same chapter.
And a lot of it, it’s also based on the feedback that we receive. So right now there are a couple of ways that they can do that. The writing process is currently done like this. Anyone can basically come to our websites register and start a story, give a short description of it and, they can even start with the first chapter or a couple of them. And then anyone else who likes the premise of it, uh, can comment and continue writing it. And they can meet each other, talk, uh, through the comments section they can just give feedback to each other.
But one question might come to your mind, what happens when you write your book.
Actually, after the finished books go through a professional editing process by the New-York-based company, ForgeFiction places them in online marketplaces like Amazon and Good Reads. that they could contribute to their ideas.
To motivate contributors, the users who created that specific book or contributed to a specific chapter are getting a monetary rewards. Depending on how many chapters among all the chapters of the book each community member contributed, they would get paid from commissions.
To make commission distribution fair, and avoid complication with copyrights, the company owns both copyrights and distribution. And in return, they share the revenue with the authors.
When, the lockdown just happened due to the Covid19 health crisis, and social isolation has become a new normal for many, ForgeFiction has launched the campaign #quarantinefiction to help people to cope with stress and anxiety through writing and reading.
The users had an opportunity to share their stories, whether it was a memoir, a situation during quarantining, or just a fictional story on the platform. It’s open-source and everyone was able to submit their feedback and vote for the best story.
The best stories were compiled into a book and now are available on Amazon under #quarantinefiction. All the profits that the book generates from sales would go to the children’s humanitarian organizations that help children who suffered from COVID-19.
You can listen to the full interview with Areg Vardanyan, Co-founder of ForgeFiction on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
