Pioneering a new form of storytelling makes for a fun stunt, as proven by the Netflix Black Mirror special Bandersnatch, which let its viewers navigate their own boutique story. The true challenge to overcome when building a business model off of a new fiction medium, however, is getting people to stick around once the novelty has worn off. A just-launched new smartphone fiction app, Galatea, is betting it can do just that.
The app, out from writing social platform and publisher Inkitt, boasts an impressive range of special effects aimed at drawing readers deeper into a story. Sound effects, visual effects and even haptic feedback are all included, and the text itself is written with internet-era attention spans in mind, arriving one spare sentence at a time. While Inkitt founder Ali Albazaz tells me that these effects allow you to literally "feel the heartbeat of the protagonist," it was the modern smartphone noises that sucked me in the most: Nothing gets my heart moving like the buzz of a phone on vibrate or the swoop of a text notification.
Inkitt, which bills itself as "the world’s first reader-powered book publisher," has a community of over one million users and 90,000 authors who have collectively written over 300,000 stories. Of these, 46 bestsellers have emerged. Now Inkitt is using its data to turn the highest performers into Galatea stories, pairing the original Inkitt author with two in-house writers who then create the adaptation as a team. Each story is broken into a series of 10-minute episodes, and users will receive one episode for free each day. If they want more, they'll pay with in-app purchases of points they can spend – 40 points cost $1.99, while 250 points cost $9.99.
Offering a wide platform for authors and then capitalizing on the stories that rise to the top is a good (and possibly the only) business model for a social writing platform. Wattpad's new publishing division, Wattpad Books, is built on the very same concept. But will the Galatea format have enough success to build a following?
Achieving growth is one of the tougher tasks for an online storytelling community in a time when Wattpad seems to be getting all the attention. Other chat fiction apps working in the space are relying on large preexisting audiences: Mobile storytelling startup Hooked has partnered with Snapchat to debut a new interactive story, while chat fiction app Yarn is collaborating with Marvel Entertainment to create stories centered on popular superheroes. One thing's for sure: Albazaz has nothing but faith in the disruptive power of Galatea.
"500 years ago Johannes Gutenberg started mass printing books, 10 years ago Jeff Bezos took a picture of them and called them ebooks. But nothing happened except the digitalization. At Inkitt, we saw this amazing devices in our hands that are capable to much more and asked ourselves what would be the best story telling experience using smartphones to their fullest potential," Albazaz tells me. "A type of storytelling that would still involve the readers' visual imagination since that's the best part of books and would even enhance it. The word 'Galatea' comes from the greek mythology - it was a statue that was brought to life by one of the gods, the same way we're bringing stories to life."
A few of the Inkitt titles being brought to life include "The Millennium Werewolves," "Tranquility," and "Mated to the Werewolf King."
