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[Q][D] Would anyone be interested in a serial fiction platform?

Post:

There's wordpress, and if that's good enough for everyone's purposes then I'll leave this project as-is, but I'm thinking features like:

  • Version control

  • Various pricing options (subscriptions, patreon-like systems, free samples + purchase, donations, etc.)

  • Merchandising (i.e. quotes on mugs, t-shirts, posters, etc. Perhaps help connecting users with designers for other stuff like icons and logos?)

  • PDF, epub, and mobi downloads

  • Genre tags

  • Recommendation systems

  • Updates via email (and other channels?)

  • RSS feeds

  • Custom CSS

  • Custom domain names

  • Author's notes

And anything else you can think of. It's just an idea at the moment, and mainly a way to see if there's demand. Cheers.

Comments:

u/None [+8] (10 hours later)

A number of us have been demanding the creation of a LessWrongFiction site for a good while. It would centralize our craving for stories about hyper-intellectual nerds like ourselves.

u/Rhamni [+3] Aspiring author (16 hours later)

That would be very practical.

u/Nepene [+2] (21 hours later)

I would, as long as it was selective to high quality rational fiction. Like an online magazine of rationality. Eagle and Alexander, selected other high quality authors.

u/eaglejarl [+1] (6 days later)

I'm flattered. :)

u/Nepene [+1] (6 days later)

Your weekly supply of rationality and munchkinnery is one a lot of us really enjoy.

u/rdalex [+1] (4 hours later)

If you have the time and skills for a project such as this one, maybe you could contribute to (or fork, I guess) efiction.org and add the features you feel are lacking. It's already widely used by fiction archives, and it's also well-known by ebook managing tools such as Calibre (by way of the FFDL plugin).

u/lehyde [+1] Nudist Beach (a day later)

Archive of Our Own is pretty great. It's only for fanfiction but the code is open source.

u/cartazio [+1] (2 days later)

sounds like one element would be well served by a content engine that at least internally use something like pandoc johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ (ignoring the community management and ecommerce elements)

u/comport [+0] (2 hours later)

I think any demand for this that exists is satisfied by Fictionpress.com and Faniction.net right now. They don't have all of those features, but they do have a lot of users and stories already.

u/eaglejarl [+5] (16 hours later)

Yes, although they also have horrible interfaces. I would like to be able to edit a document and then click "update chapter" (or just have it update automatically) instead of having to:

  • go to publish options
  • go to Manage Stories
  • go to relevant story
  • go to Content/Chapters
  • go to Replace/Update chapter
  • select chapter in drop list
  • select document in drop list
  • click submit
  • wait for full page refresh
  • wait up to 30 mins for change to be applied

Other things

  • The ability to respond to reviews, in threaded format
  • The ability to search PMs or look for all messages from a given user
  • The ability to review a chapter multiple times, for when I reread
  • The ability to f'ing copy/paste from a story, for when I want to include a snippet in a review / PM. If they're worried about copyright / people stealing other people's work, it's not like they can prevent it -- turn off JavaScript, download page, view source -- lots of ways.
  • Their goddamn link mangler has got to bloody go. There is no possible way that it provides more value than irritation.

In point of fact, FFN is a seriously craptastic platform. It just happens to be one of the best known and probably largest

u/None [+2] (19 hours later)

[deleted]

u/eaglejarl [+2] (19 hours later)

Huh. Wish I'd started writing there, then. :(

u/lehyde [+1] Nudist Beach (a day later)

You could start by cross-posting your work there.