Movellas is bringing their innovative self-publishing platform to Europe where it allows authors to write a chapter by chapter approach and get feedback from the community. You might think “great! Another publishing company, why should I care?” They just won a prestigious Meffy award for best mobile social media service and their platform is great.
Movellas is a service that anyone can sign up with and start publishing their books. Every time new content is added to the system anyone that is following you or interested to know more can be notified of anything you do. They can leave comments and critiques and often are a wellspring of information to help the author develop into a better writer.
In a few months the company is rolling out plenty of interesting features that will allow two people to co-author a book at the same time. They will also be experimenting with enhanced eBooks with audio and video for the iPad and other devices.
Moveallas was originally launched in 2008 and has grown up during that time. It is based on the very popular Japanese concept of Keitai Shousetsu, meaning mobile short stories. The largest mobile phone novel site, Maho i-Land, features more than a million titles and is visited 3.5 billion times each month. In 2007, five out of the 10 best selling novels in Japan were originally mobile phone novels.
The company will not only allow readers to read the books on mobile phones but also have expanded platforms. Readers can use the popular EPUB format and get the content on any app that reads it. This means iOS, Blackberry, Android, webOS, and other major platform applications can read the stories. They will soon be launching dedicated apps that you can download for both iOS and Android to further refine the system and streamline the entire interactive process.
Right now the service is limited to 5,000 books and half of them are in Danish and other European languages. It seems very popular with young girls who use the service as an online diary. There is no structure in place yet for authors to make any money with the platform, but they hope to include a revenue sharing feature sometime soon. So you more or less won’t make any money for awhile yet, but you can garner a following and transfer them to Amazon or other self-publishing companies.
In the end, this is a great new service that gets 500,000 monthly ebook downloads and since it is young and growing, could be a valuable resource to aspiring new authors.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
