Update and New Platform

Trying Fictionite and other ramblings

I was silent again last week. But I offer no apology or explanation beyond I am human, and life is not something we can fully control despite our desires.

However, in the last month I have been investigating a promising new platform for posting fiction online. And by new, I mean it is still in a sort of open beta phase, with not all features fully implemented, and a few bugs still persisting. And by promising, I mean it has potential to be an awesome place for finding and sharing human-made fiction, but it also has high potential to fail because the ideal is beyond its means.

Is it a risk worth taking? Well, let’s have a look.

Introducing Fictionite.com

https://fictionite.com/f/the-illusion-of-freedom-5b061bb9

I know as writers and readers we judge a book by its cover. Well try not to judge this one by the bare presentation. Besides, I usually find any website that starts with aesthetics before substance to be suspicious.

Human-made Fiction

One of the biggest draws is the focus on stories that are not AI generated. This also includes not allowing AI generated cover images. This results in a mix of very amateur looking covers mixed with some real eye catching ones provided with those who either have their own artistic talent, or the funds to commission a cover.

As for the writing, it is a tricky line between using LLM or algorithms as a tool to improve one’s writing through use of programs such as Grammarly or ProWritingAid, and typing in a prompt to generate some or all of a story. Fictionite proposes to allow editing with AI as the limit of its use in creative works there. Otherwise, the expectation is authors write their own stories, use human-made art for their covers, and natural voices for their audio books. For people who are anti-AI, this is probably the largest draw. However, they prefer to not see themselves as an anti-AI website, but rather a pro-Human one.

Enforcement is an issue which has already hit some snags and turned some people away. How do you prove something is or isn’t human-made? The creator of the website claims to have proprietary methods for flagging AI content. The details are not shared, with the explanation that this is to avoid people easily finding ways to circumvent their methods. From what I have gathered, there are automated processes to check, but human review for final decisions. This may not be satisfactory to some people who are suspicious of anything that lacks transparency, especially since in the website’s “Constitution” they claim transparency in their dealings with users. Personally, I am not bothered by this apparent contradiction, seeing it as prudence rather than seedy behaviour.

Feature Highlights

There are several features on Fictionite which I have come to appreciate. By no means is this an exhaustive list of what this platform has to offer.

Batch Upload Chapters

I had a story written in a .md (markdown) file, as I was using Obsidian to not only write but also keep updated and well organized notes. So long as the story was all in one file, and each chapter used the ‘heading’ format, it was able to scan the entire document and then break it down into individual chapters. Once done, it brought me to a list of all the chapters it found for me to look over, make any changes (such as chapter title), and then confirm. The whole process only took a few minutes.

The drawback was some of the formatting didn’t parse as well as I would have liked. I use a lot of block quotes (paragraphs headed with >) that it obliterated. However, upon mentioning this, the developer brought out a quick fix.

The nice thing about this method of bath uploading is I can also re-upload the same fine, and it will compare the text and heading names to the chapters I already have and signal which chapters have had an update and I get to decide which ones to confirm saving over, or reject changes to some.

In theory, there will also be syncing to Google Docs, but that feature had not been fully implemented since the last time I tried it.

Auto-scheduler

You can set a time and date for each chapter to go live. For people who are writing web novels and have a considerable back log, this is definitely a bonus. I only used it once just to test it out. It worked well once I got past one or two confusing aspects of the user interface.

Drafts and Closed Beta

Whenever you make a new novel and add a new chapter, it is automatically considered a draft. You have to toggle the ‘published’ status of each chapter for them to be viewable by others. If you do a batch upload like me, it means individually toggling each chapter. This wasn’t a big issue since I chose to upload The Illusion of Freedom which only has 15 chapters. However, for those joining with stories with chapters already in the 100’s this might be a bit more of a drag. It’s still a nice feature, though, since I can just toggle something back to draft to have it disappear temporarily if I need to make some majaor changes to it.

As for the Closed Beta feature, you can set your story to be in Closed Beta. The chapters still need to be published for anyone to se them besides yourself, but while in closed beta, your story is unlisted. You can then send out invites to specific users on the website to allow them to read and interact with your story.

It took a while to get this working properly, but it’s still a feature that I value highly.

Tags Instead of Genre

A novel decision (ha) made recently was to remove genres and rely entirely solely on tags for classification. Tags can be as broad as Fantasy to as specific as major character death. Each tag will have its own display page where it shows all novels given that tag. You can use use them in the search to find what you are looking for.

A neat thing is that people can suggest tags to be approved by staff and then added to the website for others to use to describe their own stories. Although, I find, it i best to first for to the “Discover” tag and type your tag idea up in the search to see if someone already many that same, or a similar, tag. For example, I was about to suggest “frame story” as a tag, but then looked and found there already existed a tag called “framing device” which is essentially the same thing.

Doing away with genres (or rather just treating them as a type of tag) is an interesting move. I initially had mixed feelings, but I can see how genre and tag could be redundant. It actually works to my benefit since I am genre-blind.

Built-in Shout Outs

A shout-out is like an advertisement you wedge in your chapters for other stories. While it was done manually with sometimes annoying code and formatting on other websites, on Fictionite you can add a shout-out to any chapter with just a few clicks. However, it only works for other fictions on the Fictionite website currently.

Another neat mini-feature is that when viewing a list of your chapters, you can see which ones have a shout-out in them.

On-site Marketplace for Cover Artists

Another interesting feature, although I have not actually used it, is that other content creators, such as artists, can make special Fictionite profiles peddling their services. At the moment, people offering services such as art and narration are available, and I understand editors and possibly publishers may be added as well.

Concerns

While I am very positively disposed towards Fictionite, I do have some concerns. One is driving enough readers to the website. Quite a few authors have already joined, but getting regular readers actually reading stories on this site is paramount to its success as a platform. Being open with just a few authors contributing their books, some of which are cross posted, may take some time. As such, the benefit of using this platform at this stage is very small.

Fictionite is being built by a single person, and I worry if it stays that way much longer, the whole site will topple once it has more users and creates more demands in time and expenses. While at the moment bugs are usually acknowledged and worked on in short order, I doubt that can keep up after some growth.

Final Thoughts

Being a part of Fictionite and watching it grow and help shape its development by providing feedback has been a rewarding experience for me. The website makes a lot of promises (such as on-site monetization) , and I don’t expect all of them to be fulfilled. But for what i already ha, I think Fictionite has a pretty good shot of becoming a contendor of places like WattPad, Web Novel, and Royal Road.

Ther is a Discord for Fictionite, found on its website. I have been a member of the server and find the community friendly. Bug reports on t server often get prompt responses.

Do I recommend Fictionite to others? Even if you don’t get an author designation, I think it is definitely worth getting involved in while it is still new. If you are looking for a pro-human platfom to read or what what you have written, it has a lot going for it.

Just a quick note: anyone can sign up for a reader account. But in order to gt upraded to an author account, you need to ask an existing author to send you an invite link, using whichever username you chose to us with the Fictionite website.

I look forward to seeing there it leads.