The new Books feature

dylankeefer1 2016-05-03 02:14:19 UTC #1

When will lower tier writers be able to submit prose to the website I would love to have the option to be able to submit my scripts or prose to the site to be consumed by readers in that manner as well rather than being forced to always need art which gets expensive as a writer.

KreativeConfusion 2016-05-03 02:18:44 UTC #2

I don't think it'll be for a while if at all. It looks like the book side of the platform is fairly selective at this point (which I'm sad about but oh well) which I can only assume is because it's new and Tapastic wants to see how it goes as a business first. It's certainly the first system I've seen where you can charge by the chapter.

dylankeefer1 2016-05-03 02:25:49 UTC #3

Yeah its kind of odd haha, I was more interested in releasing prose for free though. I still might just make images of the prose or something and release it on the comics side of things not sure if that goes against terms or anything though. I would like a way for the writer side of comics to be able to garner some following on their own. I would also like to see them add a way to tag other team members as well in the comic rather than needing to have only one creator have an account with the comic on it or forcing them to make a shared account. It would be nice to have something like face books page system has were you can have multiple people of various levels and what not. Just a thought I am having since I am only a writer which means I will always have another creator involved and it would be nice for me to be able to tag my artists accounts as well.

keii4ii 2016-05-03 02:51:53 UTC #4

One of the reasons is because they don't have a UI that lets users submit prose. So they have to do it straight from the backend or something, which is obviously not compatible with the "everyone can upload their stuff" model. I'm pretty sure it's in the works, but no idea how long it'll take.

dylankeefer1 2016-05-03 03:05:48 UTC #5

It wouldn't be hard to add since they already have a commenting and forum system in place which basically is using all the stuff you would need to add prose to be honest. Its just a matter of them actually wanting to do it or not.

keii4ii 2016-05-03 03:24:02 UTC #6

We don't actually know if it'd be easy or not, though. They can't just use the forum/commenting system because they need to make it compatible with the new key system, plus a thousand other tech-y reasons unknown to mortals like myself XD

The UI thing was one of the reasons given by the staff right here in the forum, that's for sure. I can't seem to find the thread anymore...

gabbyluu 2016-06-08 18:37:11 UTC #7

Yes, the UI is much more complicated than that. In the meantime, feel free to send an email to submission@tapasmedia.co if you'd like to submit your works for consideration.

michaelson 2016-06-08 18:48:43 UTC #8

The commenting and forums function of Tapastic has almost nothing to do w/ the Books section of the app, haha. We actually use a service called Discourse for our forums (and FUN FACT: we useddd to use a service called Disqus for our commenting system during the early days of Tapastic).

The Books section would need a lot of features to be built out in order for us to be confident enough to have it operate as an open platform, similar to Tapastic.

It's not really a matter of whether we want to do it or not - we do want to do it.

I'm a firm believer in the democratization of storytelling, it's the entire ethos of Tapastic/Tapas. I want everyone to have a chance to tell their story, and we want to build the best possible tools to help those creators succeed.

Yup! We actually work directly with all of the creators on the Book's section to upload and build their series, so in terms of scale, we wouldn't be able to handle having it an open platform right now.

Hm, currently all of the Books have the new business model applied to them - I'm not sure if we'd be able to accommodate that. However, there are plenty of other really great services for that.