Quick Pitch: Movellas is like YouTube for ebooks.
Genius Idea: Letting anyone publish and share his or her own ebook.
When novels composed text-by-text on tiny cellphone screens started making their way to the top of bestseller lists in Japan, Joram Felbert thought he could bring the same concept to Denmark with an educational spin.
Movellas, the text-message writing platform he launched in March 2010, soon found partners in about 25 schools. But it was expensive to send stories one text at a time and hard to find much of an audience without breaking the bank.
Instead of pursuing the SMS idea further, the company morphed into a platform that anyone can use for creating and sharing ebooks. About 10,000 short works -- many chapter by chapter -- have been published on the site since it launched in December. Its biggest demographic is adolescent girls, particularly those who dabble in the Justin Bieber fan fiction genre.
"A lot of the girls are dreaming of becoming an author, so it's the first step for them to try to see how their skills are working," Felbert says.
After an author uploads a story, he or she can share it with friends through email or on social networks. Others can either open the book in a reader on the site or with iBooks. If they like what they read, they can become a "fan" and get updated on new works by that author.
The Movellas community currently writes mostly in Danish, but the company is making efforts to expand to English-speaking countries. It plans to set up an office in London within the next few months.
Unsurprisingly, it won't be the only platform focusing on aspiring English-language writers. Figment, Protagonize, WeBook and WritersCafe are a handful of the websites that have created a similar publishing platform.
Movellas stands out with its mobile ebook format and its focus on adolescents. Depending on how you look at it, the site could serve as a more or less narcissistic version of LiveJournal, with a literary spin. It does not, as WeBook advertises, seem to be for "the aspiring novelist hoping to hit the best-seller list."
Like Figment, Movellas sees a potential revenue stream in charging for the work of its most successful authors. Advertising is another option.
The success of either model depends largely on how Felbert's theory about young writers pans out.
"The users prefer to read content that is written by people their own age and is community content," he says.
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
