It’s hard to believe that it’s been four whole years since I launched Protagonize one cold winter night in late December, 2007.

In 2011, we saw the launch of group submissions (and in fact the whole of the groups feature), as well as a number of other smaller improvements spread out throughout the site. Performance enhancements and optimizations were the focus of the fall. Statistics-wise, our community has grown to nearly 20,000 authors, with over 25,000 works published and over 104,000 pages of content written on the site since its inception.

All-in-all, it’s been a quiet but progressive year for Protagonize.

While it may seem that I’ve been keeping with the site overhaul I promised a few months back close to the vest, I’ve actually been working away on it since the summer. It’s a pretty massive overhaul from a visual and user experience standpoint, but it also required a lot of work behind the scenes to make the new interface work with our existing site structure.

Now, the announcement I mentioned a few days back in my holiday post: the new interface will be going into testing with our beta group sometime before January 15th. This is a pretty major step in the process of launching the new look, and I’m glad to know we have an awesome group of ~70 beta testers from among our site’s authors.

This time around, we won’t be accepting any new beta applications, but anyone who purchases a Plus subscription ($50 CAD) prior to the start of beta will be automatically added to the the tester group. Once the beta test officially kicks off, automatic beta membership from Plus subscriptions will end. If you’re in the fence, this will be your last chance to help out the site and get to experience the new interface early!

Note: If you already have beta access, you’re all set to beta test when I flip the switch. I’ll be posting more information about how beta will work once we get closer to mid-January.

With that in mind, here are a few actual screenshots of the new, fully-functional reading interface running on an iPad 2. You can click through each image to see the full-size version. (Some bits are subject to change, as usual. :)

You’ll notice some familiar faces, too, I’m sure. Enjoy!

Photo courtesy of Joccay on Flickr.

To all of our authors, readers, and members who celebrate something this time of year, we wish you a very merry Christmas (et joyeux Noël), joyous Ramadan, fabulous Hanukkah, spectacular Solstice, as well as all of the holidays I’ve probably missed. And if you’re an atheist, agnostic, or simply apathetic, we hope you enjoy the spirit of the season, too. :)

Thank you for being a part of our community, and we hope you enjoy this time (responsibly, of course) with your loved ones… or at least cuddled up with a good book and a mug of something warm, somewhere.

We’ll also have an announcement up soon about some very cool (and massive!) updates coming to Protagonize early in the new year, so keep your eyes peeled!

Image courtesy of C. K. Hartman on Flickr.

No, this isn’t a blog post to highlight the important role of the Like button on Protagonize (it is important, right?). It’s just me sharing an “aha!” moment I recently had.

We all like to get riled up by ratings and stress the importance of comments. I’m not here to convince you to change the way you use the site and interact with content. I don’t want to lecture you on the supposed ills of your behaviour. I have plenty of other Ptag posts where I’ve done that already. No, I just want to relate my own experience.

A few days back I was cruising through some of the completed works, looking for something to read. I was craving an ending, y’know? Anyway, I found some stories that looked interesting, gave them a read through, left a few comments and recommended one.

No big deal, right?

The next day I logged in and saw that one of those works was now on the most recommended list. Funny, because it had no recommendations the day before, and my comment was the only one. Suddenly the work had attracted three more comments and two recommendations. Why? I’d like to think that the sudden popularity was all my doing, but I know it wasn’t. Yes, I left that first comment and first recommendation, but I left them for a reason: the author did a great job telling the story!

The Protagonize community rewards those who put time into their writing, as time reflects passion. When you share you passion with others, often times the sharing continues. Sure, not every piece you write will garner a huge audience, and some might slip under the tide of newly posted chapters, stories, and pages. A little persistence goes a long ways and, if you’re here because of your passion for writing, readership shouldn’t be your be-all and end-all.

Then again, seeing those “one new comment was left on your work” notifications at the top of the page are always nice.

So keep on reading and, more importantly, keep on writing!

Image courtesy of Oh Geez! Design on Flickr. Thanks!

I’m told by our publisher that readings don’t do much for book sales, but that they can be good for a writer’s ego. Of course if you happen to be a big-name writer with mega-sales, you probably don’t need much help in the ego department, but if you’re collecting rejection slips right and left like most of us, then I’d say try to give as many readings as you can. But there are other reasons to do readings, beyond a potential ego-boost.

A couple weeks ago we gave a reading from We Wanted to be Writers at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, CA (a terrific indy bookstore). I was joined “on stage” by my co-author Glenn Schaeffer, and by Michelle Huneven, who’s in our book and whose most recent novel is Blame. Both are old hands at playing to an audience. Not me. It had been years since I’d last done a reading, and like most writers, I’m much more comfortable hunkered alone over a keyboard. My wife sensed looming disaster. She made me rehearse, and rehearse again, and while I rehearsed, she played the audience. And a very critical audience, at that. “You’re mumbling,” she’d say. “Look up! Engage with the audience! Slow down! And would you please stop mumbling!”

It was a good exercise. First lesson? If you’re planning a reading, rehearse. Assemble an audience of friends or neighbors who can give helpful advice. Or a hyper-critical spouse if one is handy. You might even videotape the “reading,” so you can see what others are seeing, in all its horrendous detail.

Our reading went well. I didn’t mumble too much. I slowed down, looked up, engaged with the audience. True, there wasn’t much of an audience with whom to engage; it was a hot Friday night in Pasadena, the first week of the new school year, and a horrendous multi-car accident on the 110 led to another of LA’s monumental gridlocks.

But a small audience was quite OK, which brings me back to why readings are a good idea even if they don’t do much for sales. I think the thought — or looming threat — of exposing one’s work to an audience tends to sharpen a writer’s eye and ear. Lots of writers I know read their own work aloud to themselves while they’re writing. I do, too. It’s a good way of catching glitches, awkward phrasing or boring scenes, stuff you might not catch if you’re reading silently. But reading aloud to yourself isn’t quite the same as reading aloud to others. Nothing sharpens the eye more than the potential for embarrassment. So even if you don’t have a reading coming up, now and then, assemble some friends and read to them from a work in progress. And you know what? That’s a reading!

True, by the time we read at Vroman’s, We Wanted to Be Writers had been released. So reading it aloud and finding a few little squeaks here and there in the prose came a bit too late. But I noted these for future reference, which I hope will improve the second edition. Meanwhile, it reminded me, as I think all writers need to be reminded from time to time, to pay closer attention to the work, which can only help with my new projects.

Rather than read straight from the book, I developed a script, which we all read from. What’s printed on the page might be fine when read to oneself, but a listening audience might need something that moves along more quickly, so I did a bit of editing, for pacing. Of course, We Wanted to Be Writers is nonfiction; it can be harder if not impossible to edit a passage from a novel, or especially a tightly written short story, in the interests of pacing. Still, it can’t hurt to look for opportunities, for excerpts that work well together.

We kept the reading portion of the evening’s event to 30 minutes. When it comes to readings, I think less is more. I learned this from going to a reading of Blame, in fact. Michelle read for about 20 minutes, then opened it up to questions and discussion, leaving at least this member of the audience wanting more. So, of course, I bought the book.

Finally, I think it’s helpful to remember our roots, that we are storytellers first and foremost, that before a Sumerian poked a sharp stick into a clump of wet clay and invented writing some 6,000 years ago, storytellers had already been giving readings for tens of thousands of years, probably most often around a fire, maybe also with the haunch of some now-extinct mammal turning on a spit, probably with plenty of beer (invented a couple thousand years earlier), and maybe even a hyper-critical spouse or two.

So while a reading may not do much for sales, a reading can reconnect us with our story-telling heritage. A reading energizes. It connects a writer and community.

Protagonize is a site full of talented authors, so it’s no surprise that we sometimes have to deal with some uncomfortable or suspicious behaviour from unscrupulous users who may be trying to take advantage of some of our younger or more impressionable members.

The reason I bring this up is that our moderation team has noticed some odd behaviour from a couple of new accounts on the site in the last day or so, and I thought it would be prudent to make sure you were all aware of potential publishing scams that float around writing sites off-and-on.

Please beware of things that may seem out of the ordinary, such as:

• Brand new users on the site contacting you (and/or others) out of the blue, praising your work effusively or making unbelievable or unlikely claims, then asking for your personal and/or contact information.
• Anyone claiming to be an official representative of of a publishing firm or company, but not giving you their credentials, or using unprofessional email addresses or linking to web sites they can’t prove they represent.
• Anyone asking you to send them manuscripts or copies of your work, in full.

Please be cautious when dealing with folks you don’t know on the site, and be aware that it’s unlikely that a potential publisher would suddenly contact you without giving you proof of their identity or verifiable credentials of some sort. If anything, they would not be using anonymous or generic email accounts and should be able to provide you with contact information for the firm they represent, along with a legitimate phone number or web site to look them up on.

Here are a few handy resources to educate yourselves about this type of scam. As I mentioned before, it’s pretty common, particularly on sites where thousands of eager, talented authors congregate.

• Warnings About the Schemes, Scams, and Pitfalls That Threaten Writers
• Watch Out For Publishing Scams
• How to Avoid Book Publishing Scams
• Publishing Scams: Six Red Flags That Scream “Rip Off”
• Tips for spotting publishing scams

There’s plenty of information about this type of scam out there online, and plenty of underhanded people out there to make those scams happen. If you plan to write online publicly, in any capacity, it would serve you well to educate yourselves about the potential problems you can run into when doing so.

If you have any questions or concerns about this, or if you’ve been directly contacted by someone misrepresenting themselves, please feel free to contact myself or the moderators, or flag or report any accounts on the site who may be harassing or bothering you. We’ll look into matters ASAP, and we won’t hesitate to ban accounts who are determined to be participating in this kind of behaviour.

Play it safe and be prudent! And if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. :)