Seattle Startup Embarks to Redefine the Experience of Literature and Transform the World of Publishing
Prose, a new social media literature platform, announces the global launch of its web and iOS mobile application ("Prose."). Prose allows users to harness the power of social media to help create and share their creative writing in a digital space, serving as a connector between authors, readers and publishers from around the world. Writers now have the opportunity to reach a global audience in real-time, providing a viable alternative to the traditional publishing or social media model. Readers can connect with writers and choose from more than 15 unique literary genres.
Prose is the first platform of its kind to address the need for a lasting literary medium in a heavily digitalized world.
March of Time and Skin author Jeff Stewart, the most-followed writer currently on Prose, remarks, "[This] is the premiere digital home for writers and readers of all genres, innovating the elements of social media and writing across its spectrum: providing not only the perfect place for writing and reading, but the perfect place for writers and readers to connect, inspire, and support each other in the purest and most essential ways imaginable."
The Prose web and mobile applications are synced in terms of design and functionality, consisting of five main features:
Feed: Feed lets you access what authors you are following have just published. You can share this content with your Facebook, email, and phone contacts.
Explore: Explore lets you search and discover Writing, People, and Hashtags. Writing is organized by what's Trending, what's Newest, what's most popular of the Day, what's most popular of the Week, and what's most popular of the Year. People is a list of the top-100 most popular authors on Prose, as well as a search bar allowing you to find anyone else including phone contacts and Facebook friends. Hashtags is a list of the most popular literary genres on Prose.
Write: Write lets you write anything, of any size, and assign any number of hashtags so people can easily discover it using Explore. You can also save works in progress before publishing.
Challenges: Challenges is uniquely structured to promote creation and consumption of literature through friendly competition. Through this feature, users are able to create prompts such as, "Write a 100-500 word story about the most exhilarating moment of your life." Whoever wins each challenge receives a certain amount of "Prose experience points," which leads to an increase in their ranking or "level" as a writer. For those challenges that are sponsored by Prose partnerships, winners can – for instance – receive a spot in literary publications, win a donation to a specified charity, or receive a gift card to a partnered retailer.
Profile: Profile is affected by the amount of such experience that you accumulate from using Write and Challenges. Depending on how much experience you've acquired, your Profile displays your "author prestige level." Everyone starts as a Reader, then advances to Scribbler, then to Scribe, then to Wordsmith, all the way up to Legend.
Since its launch, Prose has received encouraging reviews including this one from "Marge At Large" on the AppStore:
"Never has progressive media adequately captured the true essence of literature...until now. Prose is a no-nonsense tribute to language and a welcomed transition to the future of digital writing and reading."
Prose is an ad-free space that allows users to immerse themselves in a community that is built specifically for literary enthusiasts. Its structure is designed to inspire and entertain, but also to challenge and educate users on what's new in the literature industry.
Prose protects the rights of all authors who post their content and promises not to publish without permission, while guarding against cases of fraud or plagiarism. Users retain 100% of the creative rights to the original content that they publish.