In the past few years there has been proliferation of book-club site like Wattpad. All doing very similar stuff. Publish stories for free and then monetize on the most successful via ads or publishing deals.
It is an evolution from social media and traditional publishing, leveraging big data to make money in the very competitive entertainment industry. I admit I find it intriguing what Wattpad is doing as they have outlined in their master plan:
- We created a reading app for the RAZR and other feature phones using public domain classic books to attract our first group of users.
- We leveraged the growing audience to attract our first group of writers who would share original stories on Wattpad. We created direct connections between these writers and readers around the world.
- We established new, disruptive ways for writers to earn money, and for Wattpad to generate revenue, once the community reached critical mass.
Step two is a great evolution from the world of traditional publishing, but step 3 which they are now implementing is... lacking. Every other similar site/app follows the same formula, but differ in step 3. Some try to leverage big data for ads other focus more on landing their writers with traditional publishers or something similar. Wattpad primarily has native ads and is trying to land their authors with traditional publishers and movie makers, all through leveraging big data. Certainly a great new way for many authors, in part to the great advancement of smart phones (seriously though, Wattpad was originally also on flip phones, way back in 2006, that is some great work in my opinion).
Yet as always they are downsides, especially when it comes to the third point, monetization.
Writers
First of all on all these platforms authors publish their work for free. We all like that (readers especially), quality aside. But this approach hits a wall when a time to publish traditionally comes in where publishers obviously dislike that the book they are about to publish is free on the internet (or at least majority of it). This is often mitigated that authors build their audience and for traditional publishing create completely new work or, as @darkerwritings has pointed out in her article, writers delete the work they want to publish from the free site and leave notice to the readers where they can buy it. This is fine when an audience has reached critical mass, but for smaller authors this will remove an entry point for potential new audience. It is also a problem for the communities, but that is for the next section.
Another big downside is that only authors who make it big have any chance of monetization. With ads there is at least a bit of a chance for the smaller authors to earn some breadcrumbs, native ads might help slightly more, yet again unless you make it big there is no chance of making anything to offset the time one puts into writing. And even if it was of any significance, how long would it be before Adpocalypse like we see these days on Youtube. Some of the best writing is very much advertisers unfriendly.
Granted you probably shouldn't write if you want to do it for money, but Steemit shows us that there is another way possible and should be possible if you want be a writer. Patreon can help some, but I deal with that later.
Communities
Another group that looses in this is the community. As writers pull out of the communities that made them and go into traditional publishing, these communities loose quality content creators. Even if the community want to support their authors they can't do so on these sites (can't buy stories, can't donate to the author). Some authors might establish outside services like Patreon, but that again means that they are moving to another venue some of their work, so the platform looses that and again the community there suffers. Granted if there is enough content people will just discover new one. This is also risky for writers as most of their supporters also are interested in other authors and leaving the site/app to follow one author to another site/app is not an investment that majority will be willing to make (have to setup account on a new service, figure out how it works, etc.). Why would they, if they have everything they want for their entertainment in one place?
The community/consumers will dictate what will work in terms of monetization. From my own observations, convenience will be the main deciding factor and most often monetization initiatives reduce convenience.
The Companies & Technologies
There has been an increase of contenders who follow Wattpad's strategy betting on big data to carry them to be at least a major player in some niche market or country (orjust make money on that data). But even Amazon couldn't do anything about Wattpad and they eventually shut down their WriteOn platform. In the end they have no reason to waste money on it when they have monopoly in e-publishing with their Kindle platform. Given that the market is enormous Wattpad has still a lot of space to grow, but unless contenders come up with something new, it will be extremely difficult to compete with Wattpad. Though the market is pretty much infinite so we might see one or two more platforms in the future on equal terms to Wattpad. I personally doubt that though.
While Wattpad and other book-clubs are great for reading, they come short in the writing area. Wattpad has incorporated few nice multimedia gimmicks, but I feel more can be done on this front (we are no longer limited by paper - unless you want to publish traditionally). Another area is everything around it. Comments and discussions are great but the focus is on a story. If you want to do something bit more advanced like adding translations, collaborative writing or writing a series of stories there isn't anything to make those things blend nice together (again, you have to go to another service). Other writing tools are left to other apps/tools to be done. Given the heavy focus on mobile and the great experience of writing on mobile, that Wattpad has achieved, this is truly a shame, but understandable as that is not the focus of these apps. Their focus is as the name book-clubs suggests, to facilitate reading and enjoyment of the stories (and eventually sell those stories in some way). Still, in that there is a space for improvement in areas that have been outlined above.
My take
I'm obviously biased in this topic since I write this here on Steemit and am working on a web app in the area, though Literary Universe is first and foremost a writing tool, rather than book-club. I'm still baffled how many authors see publishing their own book as a holy grail of writing, even if they know that they might not get anything from it. Social interactions between writers aside, monetization is an issue that I have spend countless days pondering. I don't have a definite answer. Steemit shows one way it can be done, but I believe that blockchain alone isn't the solution. Nor do I think the wide public is yet ready for it (too many misconceptions and general ignorance about it).
I think offering a payed content on platforms like Wattpad could help authors. The downside (or maybe upside, depends on your view) would be that authors would have to learn to market their work and figure out when and what to put behind a paywall (e.g. completely new author without any audience probably shouldn't put their first work behind paywall). Even easier though could be donations to authors or building support services like Patreon into the app (which would also translate for more revenue for the company). If all that is done I personally would include blockchain (or along the lines of Flattr) for free stories (which would also help significantly the author to estimate which continuations of stories to do and put behind paywall).
There are other technical improvements on my mind, but those are out of scope for book-club apps and are what Literary Universe is (or more precisely what I hope it will become in due time). With Steemit we see that we can create systems where even small creators can get payed a good amount.
As much as blockchain is about decentralization, all the necessities for writing and publishing from the creative process through reading to supporting writers should be convenient and accessible from one place.
But what are your thoughts?