And the ideal user? Anybody in mind?
"The ideal user is sort of in the vein of what The Atavist was at the beginning: a small group of people getting together to launch something, and to do something independent," he says. "And it’s not necessarily a journalist with a story they can’t place but rather people saying, 'I don’t need an outlet; I’ll make my own outlet; I have something I can find an audience for, and even sell to that audience.' ”
So how would I sell my story to an audience? you ask.
"It's not all set yet, but basically you'd be able to check a box that you want to sell your story/book, and then set a price. It'd be for sale in the app and on the website, and we'd take some cut of that sale. We haven't set those percentage cuts yet; we're still playing around with some numbers. But one thing we know for sure is that if you move from a free account to a $10/month account, we'll take less of a cut. In other words, you'll be buying your way up to a better percentage."
What do you hope storytellers will do with Creatavist?
"We're really interested in the form of the book and the form of the magazine and how those things are evolving. It’s hard at this point because you can't sell anything, but I’d be interested in people trying different types of books and thinking about what constitutes a book. Because all of those things are breaking down online in interesting ways."
What do you mean "what constitutes a book?"
"I don’t want this to imply that there’s no future for the book, but in the digital world you're talking about — like the things we do: For instance, maybe it's four two-minute videos and 5,000 words interspersed, in chapters. If you come from the book world you might call that an 'enhanced book.' But it’s not that. It’s something different. I think people are just thinking, 'I have a story to tell. How do I tell that story?' We don’t want the answer constrained by the fact that they’re thinking about it like a quote-unquote book."
It'll be interesting to see where this leads.
Yeah, he says. "The most optimistic thing to look at is something like Kickstarter. I remember when it started: A couple of things got funded but people thought of it as a sort of charity thing, like 'Am I really gonna give money for these projects?' I mean maybe those guys thought they'd be funding full-length feature films but I doubt it. They started with underfunding, but now it’s the place to go to fund creative projects outside the world of big publishing and big film. Ideally this falls into the same realm."
You go to Creatavist and play around. It's easy, and clean, and best of all, it's yours:
