My name is Stephen Saine and I am one of the founders of Paperlet, along with Alvin Djunaedi. We have been building our company as an 1871 member company in Chicago and have recently launched our website to public beta and released a teaser video that we are also very proud of. Below is a brief introduction to our company and product. Enjoy!
Paperlet (http://www.paperlet.com) is a story-building platform that empowers writers to gain feedback and notoriety through progressive publishing and community features such as sharing to social networks, reader comments, and book ratings. Progressive publishing simply means the writer can ‘publish’ even a single chapter and begin getting feedback rather than waiting until they feel they have a completed work. This feedback loop is important to writers (especially aspiring ones) and the quality of their work.
[video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3wnMyI4HDE align:center]
We are also aimed at becoming a community of excited writers, readers, and artists. The platform is meant to bring both artists and writers together by allowing the writers to create the books and the artists to create illustrations, fonts, and stationery, to be included in the books. These two parties will converge via the 'Shop for Art' section of the site where the artists can sell their creations and writers can find something to enhance their story without the burden of re-formatting, uploading, resizing those creative assets. The art is immediately usable in our story-building tool. Even if the user decides to import or upload their art, the platform will take care everything for them. Simply drag and drop into the browser from the desktop.
All of these capabilities are free. We have a “freemium” model that allows writers to upgrade their book by buying art and other enhancements.
In the future, we plan to conduct writing contests and writing games to incite creative writing and interaction between users. We are in the early phases of the product so we have many exciting features to come and will be working and listening diligently to build the platform in the right direction.
With the right mix of technology and creative participation, we hope to give eager writers and self-publishers a reason to continue doing what they love. And, for those who are just now discovering the joy of writing, we hope we can give them a reason to pursue it further.
Much like the music industry was transformed by the MP3 and digital distribution, among other things, the publishing industry is being transformed by self-publishing, ebooks, and new distribution channels outside of the traditional publisher’s control.
The need for the expertise of traditional publishers is not going away anytime soon and many of these publishers are starting to embrace the new technology in an effort to emerge a stronger industry. We hope to bridge the gap between high-quality, crowd-sourced content and the decades of wisdom found in the existing publishing companies.
Start writing your story today!
Feel free to email us at [email protected] with comments or questions.
