Show HN: Fictionhub, a place to share fiction | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Fictionhub, a place to share fiction

fictionhub.io

46 pointsrayalez25 comments

For the signup, you should display your privacy policy, and probably any information related to licensing. As an author, I don't want to just throw my work on some site and have it come back to bit me later. :) The layout looks decent, and works nicely on a phone, which is where I do a lot of reading. I like how you've handled multiple chapters. In the future, adding a search box, or maybe the ability to define tags, and search by those would be nice to see. (Thinking of the point where the site could host thousands of stories) - I hope this comes across as constrictive criticism, and not bashing :)

Thank you for the awesome feedback!

You can find the search box and a list of tags on the stories page:

http://fictionhub.io/browse/

In terms of licensing - I have not dealt with any legal issues yet, but all the rights to submitted stories belong to their authors.

You need some basic rights just to do digital distribution. There is an implicit "well they uploaded it, so they must want it distributed/published," but that's a legal headache waiting to happen.

Also, they need to register an agent at the Copyright Office if they want to have DMCA Safe Harbor protection.

I'll talk to the professional lawyer and ask about how to do this right. But legal technicalities aside, my intention is to make the licensing maximally favorable for writers, so that everyone preserves all the rights to their work.

> I like how you've handled multiple chapters.

How did he handle them? As of now I just see chapters as unlinked individual posts.

Edit: I found an example to see what you mean: http://fictionhub.io/story/mother-of-learning

You might get a big traffic from HN and don't get much out of it. People might just go, read a page and bookmarked it or think they will come back later. But they usually don't. If I was prompted or had a field where I could enter my email address to get the best story of a genre I picked at the end of each week, I would gladly enter my email address. Convert!

I'll second this. Great idea but I doubt I will remember to come back in a couple days. But other sites where I know I'll forget I freely give my email to get content pushed to me or reminding me to come back (ie. weekly highlights).

You are right, as I've commented above - I will definitely implement this functionality. If you want - feel free to create an account, and I'll send you a message when the feature is ready.

Thank you for the suggestion! The website is still a work in progress, and I welcome any feedback.

I have added this idea to my todo list, I will definitely implement that kind of weekly/monthly newsletter.

If you want - you can create an account, and I'll personally email you to tell you when the feature is available.

Among HN readers are many who have denounced prompting users to give you their email. This is the best thing you could do for your product.

My goal is to make fictionhub a perfect place for writers to post and discuss fiction.

It is like a blogging platform with discovery system and community features of reddit.

It is also open source:

https://github.com/raymestalez/fictionhub

You are welcome to join and upload your stories, and to ask me any questions =)

Great start! Love the UI.

FYI I bookmarked this in my "cool shit" folder. This is a high honor.

Thank you, I'm honored =)

Speaking as a guy who wants to write books until I die, is there a way to filter out fan fiction? I'm REALLY uninterested in people's knock-off writing, and it makes me much less likely to participate in this community. It seems like you need a little more structure to allow people to self-segregate better.

Hmm... I haven't encountered many writers who really dislike fanfiction, so I haven't really thought about that problem.

But it is very solvable. I will make it possible to subscribe to and unsubscribe from categories("hubs"), they will function just like subreddits, so all the things you are not interested in will be hidden.

Perhaps upon submission there should be a required option to state whether the text is fanfiction. Regardless of quality, by including fanfiction among other works, you've reduced the average perceived quality SIGNIFICANTLY. Because everyone's seen one or two tremendous fanfic trainwrecks in their time and that's enough to make them avoid an inclusive community entirely.

It's ok to allow fanfic, just make sure it's clearly labeled and filter-able.

There are writers who will have no truck with genre fiction. Writers are an opinionated and cranky bunch who will require a lot of hand-holding to draw them out into a community. May I suggest that you give this problem (and the more general problem of how to create and foster communities) its due weight? This is not a problem to be treated idly or easily solved with some clever tagging scheme, it is the central question of your site. It is probably worth working with someone who has training or experience in this area explicitly.

how long does it take to build from scratch?

its been started 4 months ago but how much work did you put on actually?

Well, the first commit on github is 4.5 months ago, so that is how much the actual coding took. Keep in mind that website is still in beta, so there's a lot that needs to be done. I will need to do a lot of debugging and refactoring, and I'm still working on many necessary features.

Beyond that, I already had .psd files with design(I had them for a long time, I asked a freelance designer to make it for me for my previous blog).

Also, I wanted to become a successful blogger for a long time, so I've spend a lot of time thinking about how the perfect blogging platform for me would look like.

a suggestion for structure: github like forks might work well for people end stories with their plot twists.

As a new author looking to get his work out there I was interested to take a look around ... and slightly disappointed that you don't tell me anything about the site! (the kind of stuff you explain below, where you say you want to "make fictionhub a perfect place for writers to post and discuss fiction. It is like a blogging platform with discovery system and community features of reddit.")

I would suggest including an easy to find About page where you explain the value of the site to people (both authors and readers).

As it is, I looked around for ten seconds and wondered what the value proposition was.

Good luck!

Thanks! I agree, I should write the about page and tutorials for the new users. I'm on it, and it will be done soon =)

Oh apparently the Banner image is a link to a welcome page.

Reminds me of Fictionaut.

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