GigaOM (@gigaom) senior writer Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) reports on 72-year-old Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s (@MargaretAtwood) involvement with Wattpad (@wattpad) (blog) and Fanado (@Fanadoevents).
Wattpad is a Toronto, Ontario-based...online writing community with more than 3 million users and over 5 million pieces of content uploaded to the network....
Instead of just uploading books, many members of Wattpad’s community upload unfinished chapters that are still in development, or pieces of poetry they need feedback on, and then get comments and advice from other users of the service — both other writers and readers....
In addition to her work with Wattpad, Atwood is one of the founding artists involved with a startup called Fanado, which is trying to raise funds through the crowdfunding service Indiegogo (@Indiegogo) in order to launch a kind of digital-community platform for artists....
The idea behind Fanado is to give authors tools that they can use to interact with fans remotely, including the ability to share live video and audio of readings or get-togethers with a community, and to autograph and distribute both electronic books and printed books, as well as CDs and other offerings related to a work. In some ways, Fanado is the logical extension of an earlier project that Atwood was involved in, which led to the development of an electronic book-signing device called the “LongPen (@Syngrafii) — which authors could use to sign physical books in remote locations while on a virtual book tour.
Read the Fanado news release (pdf).
See book patrol’s (@bookpatrol) post, “Fanado: The LongPen Still Lives."
Also see our blogpost, "Authors Can Now Personalize Messages in Ebooks."
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