Quartet Forges Ahead with Online Collective Writing Platform

ForgeFiction won prize money at the Sevan Startup Summit in the summer of 2019. During that same summer, Hrach said, they received their first investment as part of a pre-seed round from the venture capital firm SmartGateVC, which was run by the same people who organized the startup program. SmartGateVC was joined at the start of October in the same round by angel investors from Armenia and the diaspora from the Science and Technology Angels Network (STAN) initiated by the Foundation for Armenian Science and Technology and the Business Angel Network of Armenia (BANA).

Furthermore, ForgeFiction won the first prize of $25,000 for the Armenian Tech Community Prize, fundraised by BANA, at the World Congress on Information Technology in Yerevan on October 9, 2019. By October 2019, the ForgeFiction platform had 150 weekly active users, over 1000 pages of user-generated content, and 25 ongoing books.

By May, 2020, according to Hrach, the platform increased its usage to approximately 1,500 active weekly users. This includes people who read, submit chapters and vote on the website, not just an overall quantity of users. A large percentage, around 300, have written, whether through chapters or other items on the platform.

How It Works

When you enter the ForgeFiction website you are invited to either start your own story or write a chapter in one of the existing books. Sometimes competing versions of the next chapter in a story are submitted and members of the ForgeFiction community can vote to determine which of these chapters will stand as a part of the final work. Writers get both positive and negative feedback on their works in the process. Community members can also suggest ideas for books.

Once a book is finished, it will be edited by the ForgeFiction company, and then put up for sale on the ForgeFiction website as well as other eBook sites. Every contributor to a book will receive a proportional share of royalties.

It is also possible to make “universes” to enhance a story, or share in this process. In these universes you can create locations, characters with biographies and physical descriptions and other categories of things by submitting detailed pages on which voting takes place. Books can be linked to universes.

Hrach stressed that ForgeFiction is not primarily targeting professional writers but fans. At present, he said, ForgeFiction is working with a company in New York which helps edit the fan-created books to be ready for publishing.

The first finished book, True Darkness, written by J. C. Phelps and Lorenzo Jones Hillman, was released several months ago. It is a supernatural detective story. Unlike most ForgeFiction contributors, one of the two authors, Phelps, is a professional author who already has an entire series of books published.

There is a second book which has been finished and is being edited at present. It is a fantasy book.

There is no cost to use the ForgeFiction website and platform. Monetization comes from selling the content in the form of books, and in the future, media partnerships. According to Hrach, at present, ForgeFiction is not profitable but it already is generating revenue through its first published book, and more are in the pipeline.

Areg added that though some of the books or “universes” created are fan-fiction, these are not monetized in any way and no aspect of the original work is claimed. Consequently, this is considered fair use legally.

The Future

ForgeFiction is looking to collaborate with streaming services and other companies once it has developed enough finished content, such as books, and license its stories to them. It has an advisor in Los Angeles who has worked with the film industry (though not in it) and will help to make partnerships in the film industry in the future.

The ForgeFiction platform will also be expanded beyond books to comics. Areg said that many of the current ForgeFiction members ask about this. He explained, “We are planning to do it, but we didn’t start yet because we expected it to be a bit harder to find users. We would need two types of users, those who write the story and those who illustrate it.” The “universe creation tools” on the platform already allow doing visual art such as drawings building upon a story.

A drag-and-drop system for characters is planned for the future that will help provide illustrations for people who are bad at drawing and can’t draw the characters they create. It will also easily create maps.

Hrach said that they were considering a function allowing for adding theme songs to stories or creating audio books of the stories. These might all be added in the universe creation tools section to help make the created worlds more immersive, he stated.

The present platform is all in English. Hrach and Areg explained that the cofounders all learned English in Armenia in school and by doing things like watching English-language shows on Netflix. The current platform material is written primarily by Areg along with the other cofounders but ForgeFiction recently hired an Armenian who spent most of her life in the United Kingdom but moved to Armenia. She is starting work this May and will improve the platform.

There is no Armenian-language version of the website is because the market for Armenian eBooks is really small right now, Hrach said, and the focus is to create content to be monetized. While there are requests from Armenians who wish to write, the main community of users is from Anglophone countries like the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, so there would not be much interaction with Armenian-language creations.

Of these countries, the largest number of users is from the United States and it is being expanded through marketing. YouTube channels, for example, create content in sci-fi, fantasy or other genres in English, and then invite their own fans to write stories together.

Even potential Russian-language users would offer a relatively small market at present but Hrach said that they were planning to make parallel sites in different languages such as Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. The latter two languages in particular would offer entry into growing large markets both for books and comics, which are called illustrated novels. First, he said, it would be necessary to perfect the English-language website and then move to new languages. The founders will face some natural barriers, said Hrach, since without knowing a language it may be harder to understand the dynamics involved.

Although the platform is not targeting Armenians specifically, there still are some connections being made. For example, Hrach said that ForgeFiction, based on advice received from Armenian Americans, will be soon contacting Armenian schools to see if they can use the website’s fiction for their English and literature classes.

COVID-19

It is nearly impossible to escape the effects of the new coronavirus in all realms of life. Even the members of the fictional worlds of ForgeFiction are affected. As a consequence, Areg said, ForgeFiction launched a new campaign called quarantine fiction. He said, “The idea behind this is to help people to overcome their anxiety during lockdown with the help of the arts. People share their stories, write memoirs and whatever fictional ideas they have in mind. With the help of these stories, people also are able to socialize together and cope with this situation easier.”

These stories later will be published in books available worldwide and all proceeds will be donated to charity, said Areg.