slapastory.com
Please rate/review our site. Your feedback is much appreciated.
Change to:
"Slap a Story is a place for people like you and me: people who like to read and write."
I mean, writing sites need some self-respect.
I'm a bit anal about writing sites online: I think they're all barking up the wrong tree, yours included. I think that we have places for people who want to write silly texts: forums games are ideal. This site doesn't do anything to solve that. But I'll ignore that and focus on the actual site.
You've got a good text-to-image ratio. No pictures associated with stories. That's good, because I hate sites that think visuals have anything to do with writing.
I don't like how your numbers clip off on the side. I don't know why you need ranking to begin with.
I can't say much more: it's ripping features off of Digg, visual quirks off of several sites, and it has a tag cloud. Beyond the concept, the site has a pretty standard layout. I can't criticize that other than to say that it does nothing whatsoever for me, and it's entirely undistinguished.
Please, though: for the sake of pretending to respect the medium, style your stories up a bit. Make them look nice. Use different line spacing for paragraphs, use a font that actually looks nice. When your medium is text, not doing anything to style text is just silly.
Hope that helps. Feel free to respond if you think I'm being unfair.
Again thank you for your feedback.
Have you looked at Critters? http://critters.org/ It's focused on helping people improve their writing, and as a model has functioned for well over 10 years. Very successful, on the whole.
One of the key selling points of sending stories to Critters is that you get critiques back which help you improve your writing. The other key point is that they're not published on the web. They're only published privately to members. This means that after improving your story further, you can actually still submit it to magazines for "real" publication.
I would not submit my best stories to your site, for the simple reason that I would hope to be able to send them to a magazine some day, and putting them on your site is akin to publishing them for free (magazines will not republish stories).
Perhaps if you offered some small symbolic payment (e.g. $50) for the best stories and featured those in a monthly magazine (online), that would motivate many more writers to submit their best work. There's a huge difference in the writer's mind between a paid publication and a free one, and the former is far more attractive.
Otherwise, if I'm gonna publish my stories for free, why not just put them on my own blog or start a blog for my stories?
1. When people write a story, add a very prominent field with space for email addresses of friends and family who will be interested in reading the story. You may want to use the google API to get contact information from the persons friends, allowing an automatic sending to ticked friends
2. Add a photo or avatar of the user beside the story. On the fp, add a bunch of faces of recently logged in users. It will instantly feel more like a community, and if you encourage people to use their real photo, things will stay very civil
3. Make a weekly competition. Make it prominent on the frontpage, and make the payment amount very small. For example, $10 by paypal. This is just $40 a month. Encourage people to invite their friends to come and vote for them. The best story each week wins the $10 and so on.
4. Find your target audience. Post on forums that do the same stuff
5. Allow people to write serials. For example, for a long time I used to write the fictional account of a soldier at war. I did this over years. Each entry was a short story, but together they formed a long narrative. Such long running narratives build fans
6. Allow pictures in stories
7. Here we will become a bit unethical - search usenet for an obscure but funny story. Add it to your site. Link it from reddit and digg. Alternatively, search scribd or any other document site for the most popular documents of all time that are stories. Addd to your site and do stumbleupon on that
8. Add a 'whacky' category where strange stuff is added. This stuff is more likely to be linked to than the serious stuff you want, but will drive traffic to your main site
9. Don't let your users drop off. If I sign up once, I have to get regular notifications about something, so I get invested in the site
10. Everybody just wants to have fun. You're entertainment first, don't forget that.
Thanks heaps and keep them coming.
In short you can post short stories and make them popular by voting them up, you can also discuss stories written by other people.
Please rate/review our site. Your feedback is much appreciated.
1. You expect a LOT from your users. Writing a story takes a long, long time. It's much less difficult than pressing an up button or making a quick edit. Why will people want to submit stories to the site? Are any of you prolific story writers?
2. Your people are story writers. Where do you find them? This is more of a marketing problem.
We do need to market this properly and find people who are interested in writing stories.
Going by the amount of blogs/literary sites and forums that are out there - we reckon that these people do exist in certain numbers. We just have to find find and convince them that our platform is right for them.
I could, of course, be wrong.
You never know until you try it.
It could give you a huge influx of users for the month of November...and some of them would stick around. I no longer write much fiction outside of that month (I do so much technical writing for my startup that I don't seem to have the drive for it outside of work), but I know a lot of the participants are frequent writers.
Getting publishers involved somehow would also be a good direction. Many print-only publishers are trying to figure out how to deal with this new-fangled (less than twenty years old...clearly unproven!) web thing...perhaps you can help them. I don't immediately see the connection, but perhaps user-created and user-edited books are the wave of the future. Somehow applying the reddit/digg model to fiction seems at least an amusing thought exercise.
Thanks Again
I think that to make the site successful you need high quality stories that people want to read and vote up. I am not sure that authors would be willing to post on your site knowing that they are then granting you a license for their work.
What we want, however, is to be able to use user-submitted content for any possible advertising or promotion purposes. This is kind of what facebook does except not as evil. We reckon that the user will benefit from this too (as it will show off his story to more people if we link to it in an ad).
We will make all of that clearer in our T&C. Thank you!
I do see the point that others have about who the site might target. Serious writers might steer away from the site in favor of workshop style sites, leaving you with prolific, but possibly weak writers. I have a feeling that might be a rather young demographic and I wonder how well the site would monetize. Still, I wish you the best with the venture and will check back.
Only recommendation I can think of is... have the votes collect into points for authors. So then you can show 'top writers' and have competitions etc.