

Rate My Startup - Slap A Story - sbarski
http://www.slapastory.com/
Slap a Story is a place for people who like to read and write. Submit your original short story (heck, you can do it anonymously) for everyone to read and discuss. As well as rate and comment on stories submitted by others.<p>Please rate/review our site. Your feedback is much appreciated.
======
unalone
"Slap a Story is a place for people like you and I; for people who like to
read and write."

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.

~~~
Ilia
Firstly, thank you for your honest feedback. Writing sites do need self
respect, and this is the reason that we have developed this site. I am
personally a developer and an avid reader. Although it may seems like a
ripping of Digg - digg doesn't have a fiction category or any sub-categories
that we have included. In terms of layout we didn't want to get too creative,
but we do want to make it as simple on the eyes as possible - so our priority
at the moment is to style the stories.

Again thank you for your feedback.

~~~
unalone
Absolutely. Well, I'm working on a site for writers at the moment, and it
focuses on a completely radical angle. When it's done I'll tell you, and I'm
hoping you tell me if it's got flaws as well. We writers ought to stick
together. :-)

~~~
Ilia
definitely, let me know and I will put your link on my site.

------
swombat
The fact that the stories are published on the web is a huge downside
actually.

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?

------
maxklein
I like the site, so I have no criticism. I'll just give you some ideas you can
possibly use to promote the site:

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.

~~~
Ilia
Wow, this is fantastic, we are working on some of the ideas you mention, the
others we will need to add to our list.

Thanks heaps and keep them coming.

------
sbarski
My friend and I have been developing a brand spanking new site for avid
readers and writers. It is called Slap a Story and as of today can be accessed
at slapastory.com.

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.

------
marketer
I have a couple comments on the UGC aspects of this site. I honestly don't
know how large the 'story' market is, but I've had some experience with UGC
sites.

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.

~~~
sbarski
You are right. Writing is a lengthy and demanding process.

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.

~~~
comatose_kid
How about becoming the twitter of stories? Limit it to 140 words or something
(analogous to the 4K compos from the Amiga demo scene).

~~~
Ilia
that is somethng to think about. Not sure how writers will react to 140 words
thought. Also do mean characters, right?

~~~
comatose_kid
140 characters is probably approaching some lower bound of what is required
for an interesting story. 140 characters, while conforming to the length of a
text SMS, would probably be too brief...

------
SwellJoe
I question whether this is a "startup" or a "hobby with a small revenue
stream". The site looks nice, no doubt about that...I think you've executed
well (aside from some typos--"sing up" on the story page under the comment
box, for example), so I'm not saying you're building an amateurish site. Just
that I can't imagine how this can make enough money to support more than one
or two people.

I could, of course, be wrong.

~~~
Ilia
You are right, at the moment we are trying to build a mini community of
writers. Mostly this was a request from a few friends of mine that are avid
writers. We just want to see how far this can go. Any exposure for them is
good. Maybe we can even get publishers on board.

You never know until you try it.

~~~
SwellJoe
I've done NaNoWriMo once, and plan to do it again this year, I think. And a
big part of that experience is the "shared misery", or "in the trenches
together", vibe that the whole project engenders. November is coming up
fast...you might consider sending a note to the fine folks who run that
project, asking how you could make your site work well for NaNoWriMo
participants. The worst they can say is "no" (or maybe the worst they could do
is re-implement your idea themselves...they do seem to be hackers themselves,
but that's an unlikely scenario).

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.

~~~
Ilia
Thanks for the advice, I will be in touch with NaNoWriMo people see what they
say.

Thanks Again

------
rksprst
I like your idea. However, I don't like the fact that simply by submitting
something I automatically grant you a license to do whatever you want with it.
In fact, I was going to submit a short story but will not after reading your
terms and conditions.

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.

~~~
sbarski
If you read the last paragraph in our T&C you will see that we do not assert
any ownership over your content (story). It still belongs to you and you can
do with it whatever you like.

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!

~~~
rksprst
I did read that last paragraph where you say that I still have ownership over
my content. However, I am still granting you a license to do whatever you want
with the story. Meaning you can go and sell the top stories to publishers
legally. I don't like this. I would make it so that you can only use it for
promotions with prior written consent from the author and the only license I
grant you is to display it on your site.

------
Tlogmer
You've got a grammatical error in the first sentence -- "people like you and
I" should be "people like you and me" -- me is the direct object.

~~~
sbarski
Good point. Thank you!

------
coglethorpe
I like this idea, mostly because it's one I had earlier and never had the time
to implement. :-) From a cursory glance, the site looks good.

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.

~~~
coglethorpe
I'll say this: the site was good enough to get me to come back for a second
look. I do agree with an earlier poster who said the stories need better
layout. They were a bit hard to read as they look now.

------
qhoxie
I like the idea pretty well and I think the interface is well-executed. The
markup is a bit heavy, but that should not be top of your list.

~~~
Ilia
Thanks qhoxie, the site is still in beta and design is always under question..

------
psyklic
What about having users write a quick, one-sentence grab-your-attention hook
to display under each story, rather than just displaying the first few lines?

------
MickeyOne
Interesting idea, although am not sure about the colors even though the site
looks clean enough.

------
ashish1
wow.. this can go a long way... Feedback: Man i need search on stories and
users...

~~~
Ilia
Thanks, search is coming... but you can filter by user by clicking on the
username in the user "cloud"

------
louislouis
awesome idea and site.

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.

~~~
Ilia
Definitely will be in the next release.

------
Ilia
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated

------
infactitsme
i just fuckin LOVE this SITEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

~~~
Ilia
Thanks for that... you are too excited... any feedback that we can actually
use?

------
infactitsme
Awesomenessssssssssssssssssssss

~~~
Ilia
Thanks again.

------
ashishb4u
wow.. this can go a long way... Feedback: Man i need search on stories and
users...

