Hi, my name is Paolo Danese. I am a writer (epic fantasy), former journalist, and now tech founder. I am working with other writers and creators on the launch of storya.app, a next-gen publishing platform. I nodded my way through your article, and many of the reasons you lay out (troubles with traditional, self-publishing, serial novels) are what led me to start this project. Storya combines a social network with a multimedia publishing platform with a Patreon-style monetization option for creators. Sounds mad enough? Not yet! We use AI translation, AI art generation (and soon AI audio narration and more) to take everyone’s writing (but we will focus especially on circulating content from the Global South) and make it accessible to a global audience that, frankly, just does not care about books anymore.
Books are dead. Publishing (and self-publishing) are dead. I think writers need to look at where the world is (Instagram, Tik Tok) and learn from it, develop new forms of storytelling, experiment. As much as I love my pile of dead trees, it is not sustainable, it is not inclusive, it just does not work anymore. So writing needs to evolve. AI is one way to easily and cheaply break the barriers and make “words” into something more, something closer to what 21st-century eyeballs/brains like. Collaboration (something that sadly nobody ever talks about), is the other piece. Writer alone? Weak. Writer + illustrator + narrator: sky is the limit! So again, let’s open our minds, let’s experiment, let’s reinvent. We have the tools. Let’s be brave! Feel free to drop cheers and insults at paolo@storya.app! And do check us out at storya.app. Happy to continue the conversation anytime. :)
