
Apply HN: fictionhub – the best place to publish, discover and discuss fiction - rayalez
http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fictionhub.io&#x2F;<p>My goal is to make the perfect place for writers to find their audience, and for readers to discover great writers.<p>Currently there&#x27;s a few websites where people can post fiction, but none of them are done very well.<p>fictionhub will make it easy for new authors to get discovered, build their audience, and sell their works.<p>I want it to be the Hacker News of fiction writing - awesome community sharing high quality stories, discussing cool things, and helping each other to get better at writing.
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christudor
I'd love a place to find great writers/writing.

Are you talking about fiction/short stories or other kinds of writing (e.g.
politics, business, economics, etc.?)

Why would I go to /this/ site as opposed to the many other sites that have
great (professional, paid) writers? If I want a great bit of fiction, I'll go
to a bookshop. If I want a great bit of political analysis, I'll go to (e.g.)
the New York Times. How would you convince people like me that /this/ is the
place to find great writing?

Most people don't make for great authors: will you allow just anyone to
publish work on your site? If so, how will you make sure the really good stuff
gets to the top?

Good luck with everything with this!

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jay_kyburz
Hello rayalez. I posted my idea for something similar moments ago!
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11443376](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11443376)

I would love to chat about how you plan to monetise fictionhub. Any ideas yet?

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rayalez
Hi! Monetization is pretty straightforward - allow authors to sell their
stories.

Also I'm thinking about experimenting with the kind of monetization
blendle.com is using - people automatically pay a small fee for reading a
story(automatically refundable if they didn't like it).

Edit:

fixed the link to blendle.

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jay_kyburz
I'll check out bende.com Thanks for the tip.

edit:hrmm.. bende.com sells a lot of meat. I think I got trolled.

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rayalez
Whoops, sorry, I meant [https://blendle.com/](https://blendle.com/) =)

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jay_kyburz
haha thanks.

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akoder
Hello Rayalez!

I appreciate your initiative and drive to building a great platform for
fiction. I would love to know how you would differentiate fictionhub.io from
other services such as [http://wattpad.com](http://wattpad.com). Any writer
would love to reach more audiences and i feel this is what made medium.com a
hit among bloggers. Taking this into consideration wattpad.com has 50,000,000
to 100,000,000 android app installs.( taken from their android app page). This
means that there are more people who might read my stories. So why would i
share my stories in fictionhub than in wattpad?

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atroyn
Product Hunt currently does books and podcasts, but that part of that
community is considerably smaller than the rest of the site.

How will you attract the first readers and authors to your platform?

How will you ensure a high standard of quality, both in submissions and in
discussion?

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rayalez
At the moment I am personally looking for great authors, and asking them if
they would like to join(or allow me to add their stories).

We already have some pretty amazing authors and stories(check out
[http://fictionhub.io/story/the-metropolitan-
man](http://fictionhub.io/story/the-metropolitan-man) for example). Great
fiction attracts readers, and as we grow our audience of readers - other
authors have more incentives to join.

To maintain the high quality of content, we will have an invite system - new
authors post their stories to the "sandbox"(a list of unapproved posts), and
existing members of the community can send invites to the authors of stories
they like. So we start with a few great writers, and organically grow from
there.

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atroyn
What else could you do to attract readers? How are they hearing about the site
now? Is there a particular kind of reader/author you're trying to appeal to
first?

I would love to see an alternative to 1.) Fiction publishers as middle man and
2.) Awful self-published fiction in the kindle store.

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rayalez
I want to grow organically, through the content quality and word of mouth.
Right now most of the people come from social networks(reddit, medium,
tumblr). I am an aspiring writer myself, so as I promote my own work, and
works of other writers, people discover the platform.

Also I've been thinking about creating fiction writing competitions - that
would attract more writers, create original content, and give us some
publicity.

And, many of the writers have their own audience, so if they choose to use
fictionhub as their main platform - they will bring their readers with them.

Ideally, I would like to first attract readers and writers of rational
fiction(basically hard SciFi, you can read more about it here:
[http://fictionhub.io/story/rational-
fiction](http://fictionhub.io/story/rational-fiction)), that is people from HN
and /r/rational.

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Smaug123
What specifically do you have over ArchiveOfOurOwn?

