Fictionaut launches: community-sourced literary publishing

Several literary communities have started with varying results. Here’s another addition to the mix.

Fictionaut (according to the announcement on the blog) is a burgeoning hub for a growing number of diverse literary scenes. I was a member when it was in private beta and have watched the community from afar. It has attracted a variety of contributions from new and established writers. Key features:

• a Save as PDF feature
• social networking features (contacts, bookmark, groups)
• a way to browse through members/contributors plus author profile pages
• a rich text editor, tags, and the option to choose creative commons licenses
• to see what a sample story page looks like, go to my attempt at fiction. 
• opportunity to make comments
• the ability to make a story as private (for members of private groups only to see it)
• an active blog that links to notable stories (plus publications of Fictionaut authors elsewhere). (This blog is well-written and gives links both inside and outside the Fictionaut community).
• a DIGG-like point system for recommending stories

The best thing about this site is that it lets you create groups (public or private) on the fly and add people to your contacts. This can make it easier to follow stories and individual writers. On the minus side, aren’t you growing tired of having to add contacts/friends to every community site you end up joining? Now I need to decide: do I know Maud Newton well enough to add her to my contacts?  (all this social awkwardness and uncertainty about the implications of adding a friend makes my head spin).

For the moment, membership is by invitation only. My unofficial count is that they have 800+ members (it’s unclear to me how many are writers, although I suspect the percent is probably higher than 75%). When the site was in beta, I would be surprised if membership continues to be by invitation only for much longer, but the Fictionaut people have proceeded fairly cautiously.  Four days ago  I requested an invitation for one of my pseudonyms and have yet to receive a response.  (I have 4 invitations to give, so if anyone is desperate enough, just send me an email idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net ).

From a technical side, nothing is ground-breaking about Fictionaut. But the site incorporates many common elements of web applications into one box in a user-friendly way. Also, it fills a huge  void in the online world  by making it easier to like-minded literary types to find one another under one roof. It  is a great way to make contact with editors of other online publications.  For now, the site’s focus has been on increasing its user base of writers.  The real challenge lies in how well it reaches out to readers and how successfully it keeps readers on its site.

From a writer’s point of view, it would be useful to add a few sample stories or chapters to Fictionaut as a way to gain prominence in the community. It is primarily useful for short forms (poetry, flash fiction, short fiction). Once you become a member, you could join groups on Fictionaut which are tied to other literary sites. 

Here are the things currently on my wishlist for Fictionaut:

• the ability to create anthologies (i.e., playlists, or groups of articles) within a group.
• the ability to add images to individual stories
• a reading view which removes the sidebar of comments. Can you imagine trying to read Franz Kafka’s Trial and having to have  a sidebar  of asinine opinions on the right?  
• some acknowledgment that the stories can be repurposed into another format (like .epub), etc.  For example, I would love to see somebody create a Calibre recipe which will scrape off the highest rated stories every month.

My long term problem with Fictionaut is how to identify  well-regarded stories. Sure, the Story page lets you sort by Recommended/Most Recent/Most Read/Most Discussed/Alphabetical. That solves the browsing problem, right? Not really. On the most recommended page,  I have a listing of the most recommended stories, starting with the story with the most votes. I hear that many people are buying and recommending Glen Beck’s book; why should I care? On the other hand, I would probably be interested in the favorites of Budd Parr (another well-known blogger).

Frankly,  few readers are going to take the time to surf through the online slush pile (but more power to those who try). Each member is probably going to be familiar with a small portion of published stories on Fictionaut which are worth reading.  Even those members whose literary tastes I trust are simply going to have a list of favorites on Fictionaut. Is that enough?  The problem comes when an astute reader’s favorites list grows too long to keep track of.

The Groups function are actually more useful for this function (see an example here).  Not only do groups let you view members and post on a group section, members can recommend stories to the group itself. So what? Is that really enough?  Warning: If all members have the chance to contribute something, chances are that 90% of it will be crap.

Imagine I were to create a hypothetical group of TeleRead contributors and these people all joined and starting adding stories to a a group pool.  People at TeleRead have interesting tastes, but I seriously doubt I would enjoy many of the same things that David Rothman or Chris Meadows or Ficbot or Court Merrigan enjoys (sad, but true). This isn’t a reason to avoid groups altogether, but you just can’t assume that emerging groups will automatically filter out everything except the best.  Having a DIGG like moderation system or group pool of stories  is no substitute for sensible selection by a seasoned editor.

Fictionaut groups might  be useful for starting  memes for storytellers. Suppose fictionaut sets a theme for the week  (i.e., “the wedding cake in the middle of the road”) and asked contributors to make a story with this detail. Later, people could vote for the most interesting story using that theme.  Admittedly, this would mainly interest creators of microfiction, but it would be an effective use of social networking. 

In summary: Fictionaut is a promising literary debut. Though the site’s features are  not really ground-breaking, it is (so far) ad-free and a good way to self-publish and learn about other writers.