Sponsored Post: Moozvine Brings Crowdfunding to Publishing where Readers can Fund their Favorite Authors

Quite a unique writing platform was brought to our attention that takes the concept of crowdfunding and adjoins it to publishing! Moozvine a new platform for readers and writers is changing the way authors can fund their projects and how readers can control their demand market.

We reached out to Moozvine and asked them a few clarifying questions to really bring home the message of what this publishing platform has to offer. Our first curiosity fell with wanting to know how its founder, Rich Martin came up with the idea of creating Moozvine.

1. How did you come up with the idea of creating a writing platform like Moozvine? 

Many years ago, I was a software engineer working in London for a company producing digital rights management software for the music industry. It rapidly became clear to me, and many others, that the fundamental concept behind DRM was flawed: it could only ever be a burden to legitimate users while doing almost nothing to prevent deliberate piracy. 

More than that, however, I started to understand that it was an attempt to directly translate a business model from the physical world to a realm where it was fundamentally inappropriate instead of creating a business model specifically designed around the unique properties of the internet. 

Years later, I was living in Brazil and — perhaps as a result of too much sun on my head — I decided to become a fiction writer. I had always loved writing and now I set my mind to turning it into a career. The first step was research: to discover how one could actually make money from this craft. I quickly came to learn the shocking truth that most successful authors earn a pittance from their writing and earn their primary living from other means. The disparity between how much society clearly values its authors and how little it pays them both amazed and dismayed me. It was so unfair. My dreams of sitting in my hammock in the tropics with a laptop, like some modern-day Graham Greene or Hemmingway, started to shatter. 

These two things — the inability of the music industry to adapt to the arrival of digital media and the unfair plight of authors — lurked disconnected in the back of my mind until the arrival of ebooks. With horror, I watched as the book industry embraced the arrival of the digital realm with the same panic that had inflicted the music industry. The identical rush to translate their old and inappropriate business model from the world of physical media and then patch up the flaws with software that could never work. 

By this time I was working for Google in Switzerland, fully bought into the culture of applying technology in disruptive ways to solve real problems. I believed this was a problem I could solve. I left Google to found Moozvine. 

Moozvine grew out of these ideas together with my believe that openness, freely-available, freely-shareable products are the key to success in the digital world. Anything that inhibits access to or sharing of your product — DRM, paywalls, or walled-garden digital stores — are doing nothing but stopping people discovering, loving and talking about your work. Nothing can ever go viral if it is trapped behind a paywall.

At the same time, we are seeing from platforms like Kickstarter, Indigogo, Patreon, Humble-Bundle and others that the public are not only willing to, but eager to support the authors and projects they care about. 

Moozvine combines crowdfunding, pay-what-you-want, and Creative Commons licensing to provide a platform which can reward authors fairly for their work without imposing any restrictions or constraints on how readers discover, enjoy and share the books.

As it is a fairly new concept, we know many of our readers will have some questions about how the platform actually works. Rich answered a few of your possible inquiries:

2. What would you like potential users to know the most about Moozvine? 

That they are not only able to share the books in any way they want — email, social media, thepiratebay, whatever — but that we actively want them to. If they like a story and want to pay for it, they can pay any amount they want. Their money goes immediately to the author, so they can carry on producing great stories. Users don’t need to create an account or sign-up to do either of these: just go ahead and read, share and support.

3. Would you say moozvine is similar to writing platforms like Wattpad and Tablo? If not, why? What makes Moozvine unique?

There are lots of platforms and websites popping up, which take different approaches to this problem. I mentioned Kickstarter, Indigogo and Patreon above and many authors use these. These platforms focus on the funding aspect. The people visiting these sites are either existing fans of the authors following a link from the author’s blog or social media presence, or they are “investors” browsing around the site looking for interesting projects. That’s great, but it’s an inherently smaller audience than a “bookstore” site like Amazon or Barnes & Noble where the audience are consumers looking for something to read. We want Moozvine to be a place where people come to find something great to read. The audience is made up of “readers”, not just an author’s existing fans or crowdfunding junkies. While they are there, they can discover new authors they have not read before, read and download stories for free, while being gently prompted (“reminded”) to support the authors they like.

Wattpad is focussed on connecting writers and readers in an open way. That’s great, and we love that. Wattpad is also open in that anyone can publish their work on there. This makes it great for new authors who believe they have the talent to start getting people hooked on their stories and grow their audience. The downside is that it can make it tougher for readers to find the good stuff.

Moozvine is closer to a traditional magazine in that we select edit and curate the stories we publish and commission great artwork to go with them. We are very selective about what we publish: high-quality stories from great, usually award-winning authors.

Another difference with Moozvine is that we think it is very important that the reader should be able to read the stories in whatever way is best for them: by downloading the story in .epub (an open ebook format supported by most ebook readers), by sending it to their Kindle, or even just by reading it directly in the webpage. A lot of sites will force you to read their stories in a particular way, usually either in their own app or within their webpage so that they can control and monetize the process. That usually makes for a horrible reading experience.

The various platforms that have emerged in recent years clearly demonstrate one thing: there is a big problem here that the traditional publishers are not addressing. Readers are not happy, authors are not happy. It is absolutely fantastic that there are now so many different approaches being tried and I’m sure we will see other alternatives coming along.

My biggest hope is that within the next few years both readers and authors will have several alternatives to choose from. Alternatives that give authors a fair salary from their work while allowing readers to read what they want how they want and support the authors they care about.

We touched base on the subject of Moozvine's growth, whether or not the platform is finding a place to lay roots and whether or not the platform was actively contemplating expanding their author roster.

4. How long has Moozvine been in existence? Is it gaining a healthy following of users, social media followers…?

We launched with our first story, Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh, on August 28th last year. User growth has been slow. Primarily because I’m absolutely terrible at social media and marketing and have had trouble finding someone capable of performing this role. This has been the biggest problem Moozvine has faced.

5. Do you have plans to bring in more authors and expand on your genre offerings besides science fiction?

Absolutely, there are several directions in which we plan to expand. We have several stories from new authors lined up and receive quite a lot of high-quality submissions. We have slowed down the rate at which we are publishing stories at the moment, because we want to allow the user base to grow slightly first. It’s pretty disheartening to be shouting great stories out to the world if nobody is listening.

In terms of expanding genres there are two approaches we can take here: we can either just add new genres to the existing Moozvine site, or we can launch separate domains for each new genre. There are advantages and disadvantages with both approaches and we have not yet fully decided which approach is best.

We will also soon be launching Moozvine mobile apps (iOS and Android) which will make it easier for people to discover and read books. We have discovered that people generally prefer to read books on their mobile devices, but browse websites on their desktop; with Moozvine as a web-based platform this creates a disconnect between the process of book discovery and book reading. Having a mobile app, which provides both a good discovery experience and a good reading experience will be much better for our users. It will also allow improve our ability to keep users engaged by notifying them of new publications — something we can’t do with the web-based platform since we are adamant that we do not want to force consumers to create accounts.

 One of our biggest questions was how Moozvine actually worked; by browsing the site, it comes across like a crowdfunding platform for book publishing, but according to the founder, it does have some differences, as he explained:

6. Is Moozvine a type of crowdfunding platform? The about section is rather vague, I’d like to make sure I have the format correct. Do readers pay in donation form, like crowdfunding, until a book is fully funded and then Moozvine releases the book for free to the public? 

It is both crowdfunding and pay-what-you-want:

When a book is first put on Moozvine there is (optionally) a 14 day funding period. During this time the public can pledge and can read a sample of the story. At the end of the 14 days, if the amount pledged equals or exceeds the release threshold, the pledges are collected and paid to the author, and the book is released.

After a book is released, the book is free to everyone. The book’s webpage contains a “Pay” button at the top and bottom with some encouragement text which allow the public to pay for the story — any amount they choose — if they wish. 

The combination of these two funding models gives the author both a minimum amount that they receive in exchange for the release of their work and an ongoing funding stream which can grow with the story’s popularity. I.e. if a relatively unknown author releases a story for a small release threshold which then goes viral because people are sharing it, his pay-what-you-want revenue will grow accordingly.

7. If this is the case, how do you regulate what the full funding amount is? Exactly how are authors deciding on these fund amounts? 

Currently we decide this with the author based on a variety of factors: the current size of our user base, the success of previous funding events, the relative popularity and social media following of the author.

8. Could you say that readers act as publishers, paying writers for their work before it releases? If so, do readers get snippets, synopsis’ or other previews of the content before paying. 

You could say that the readers are something like investors in the open publication of an ebook. Before the book is released, a sample of the story is available on the website. One thing we have started doing as well is “thank you editions”: when someone pledges more than a certain amount they immediately receive a personalized thank you edition of the story. This contains a frontispiece addressed to them and a thank-you message from the author.

9. How does your selection process work for submissions? How many selections are currently on Moozevine?

It has mostly been by word of mouth among the authors. We have found that authors have been extremely receptive to the idea and lots of the authors we have contacted have recommended the project to other authors. 

So far we have published 24 ebooks. These have been a mixture of short stories, novelettes and novellas.

10. Are readers ever aware of how much a book has been set to be funded for during the funding process?

Yes. During the 14 day funding process, there is a progress bar that shows the current amount that has been pledged and the threshold. There is also a table that shows the amount pledged by different pledgers (with the anonymous pledgers bundled together, of course).

About Moozvine & Rich Martin

Moozvine currently has one employee: me, Rich Martin. Founder, engineer, dogsbody, designer, tea-maker (although my wife sometimes helps with that), salesperson, and really, really, bad social-media marketer. Moozvine has 15 authors on its roster.

Moozvine GmbH is a limited company registered in Amden, Switzerland. 

This article is a sponsored article. Sponsored articles are meticulously selected and only those that genuinely appeal to CJLeger.com's readership are selected. Sponsored posts help fund the site's publication roster. Moozvine's sponsored article helped fund the 2016 CJLeger.com Spring Feature roster, which includes prepublication reviews, book reviews, author spotlights and more. This sponsored post has aided in the empowerment of authors and expansion of their presence.