Between trains, between doors
This is a brand new, small and time-boxed project I started in may 2015 out of a frustration regarding reading and the publishing industry.
Mostly feedback (or lack of thereof)
Discuss with any publisher: they will swear that they receive feedback and, when you ask from which sources, how do they gather this so-called feedback and how their authors can receive it, you'll realize that they only receive small chunks of commentary, only words from insiders or very rare meetups with people that will definitely like the discussed book.
In fact, books, as is, is not the best medium to ferry back-and-forth discussions between authors and readers —yet the publisher will still stand in the way, for obvious reasons.
Publisher-side, the problem is also that less and less publishers are conducting the craft of editing, removing another layer of quality control and feedback.
I had the very same issue, struggling to get feedback: you cannot rate your own work as positive or negative since the tools are lacking.
Enter Poscat
Poscat relies on a very simple set of principles/hypotheses:
- People do no read because they do not have the time;
- Authors cannot get feedback because of the overwhelming amount of layers between them and their reader-base;
Poscat tries to solve these issues by fragmenting a story into very small chunks that will be send, one day after another, by transactionnal emails. Now, they can read while they wait in line, between trains, between doors; they can rate every tidbit as a good, neutral, bad or, if they feel like so, writing directly their feedback to the author.
This is a still an early beta and is, for now, online for a handful of people. URL pending.