PenFM: Fall back in love with writing via your terrible friends

http://www.indiegogo.com/penfm?a=1665689

by edwardog • 14 years ago

59 40 14 years ago

indiegogo.com

neoveller11• 14 years ago

Thanks for posting this, edwardog! Glad someone felt compelled to.

I'm the guy behind PenFM. AMA.

iamdave3• 14 years ago

Okay. Why ".FM" domain?

neoveller11• 14 years ago

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".

jasondenizac2• 14 years ago

Not all of my friends are terrible, though - so I'm somewhat conflicted.

leisun• 14 years ago

This is really popular in China ;-)

adiM• 14 years ago

Darn, for a moment I thought that this was a site that encourages people to write with a real pen: fall back in love (PenFM).

CKKim2• 14 years ago

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?

neoveller11• 14 years ago

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?

- and more. hope that's good for now. :)

CKKim2• 14 years ago

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!

fusiongyro7• 14 years ago

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.

neoveller11• 14 years ago

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.

neoveller11• 14 years ago

http://www.pen.fm/read/A-Chance-Autumn-Encounter-PNefec68b4f...

Demo of our reading experience

jeswin• 14 years ago

I have a similar project called "Social Typist". https://github.com/jeswin/socialtypist

Definitely something worth exploring. Best of luck.

Edit: last line.

etherextraction• 14 years ago

Other then the export features to epub, how is this different then just using google docs?

neoveller11• 14 years ago

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.

iamdave3• 14 years ago

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

ChristianMarks• 14 years ago

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.

neoveller11• 14 years ago

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?

acabal• 14 years ago

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.

oulipian3• 14 years ago

Using Ayn "Virtue of Selfishness" Rand to advertise your collaborative writing app is like using Donald Trump to advertise hair-care products.

DividesByZero• 14 years ago

Not least due to her dearth of writing ability.

neoveller11• 14 years ago

Every collaborative story needs an amphetamine-driven cynic to cause a little bit of chaos.

oulipian3• 14 years ago

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.

fusiongyro7• 14 years ago

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?

oulipian3• 14 years ago

Sure. But it's like using a picture of a circle, a triangle, a square, and a swastika to suggest "geometric shapes".

shelf• 14 years ago

Novel interface. Get the fanfic authors on board.

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.

PenFM: Fall back in love with writing via your terrible friends

Related Stories