Portfolio: Curious Fictions
Curious Fictions was a Y Combinator-backed publishing startup, specializing in short and serialized fiction by professional authors. By invitation only, over 700 authors used the site to publish over 10 million words and collect payments from readers, and the site was featured in TechCrunch, The Verge, and more. You can visit an archived version of the site here.
Initial Key Insights
As founder and designer, I worked closely with authors to understand their needs. The site began with one key insight: after a short story is published by a magazine or journal, after about 6 months the rights typically revert back to the author, so authors were free (and highly motivated) to publish those reprints online themselves. Much of the best short fiction is hard or impossible to find in print, let alone digitally, so authors were keen to use Curious Fictions to both showcase their work and collect payments from readers.
The site quickly attracted high-quality content, such as the fantastic Nebula-nominated “Robot” by Helena Bell. I launched the site with a quickly-expanding library of content, and curated and blurbed a featured a story every week to send out to our extensive email list.
Designing for Varied Backgrounds
Curious Fictions authors were multinational, multigenerational, and often nontechnical. The site needed to be intuitive to use for a wide variety of author backgrounds, while also introducing more sophisticated features in an approachable way.
I knew that most magazines take story submissions in Standard Manuscript Format, so I made it easy for authors to add their pen name, connect their bank account via Stripe, and copy and paste their stories straight from Word or Google Docs. Authors could get their stories up and running in minutes.
Progressive Enhancement
Authors could easily create cleanly formatted stories out of the box with just copy and paste, but I built a powerful set of author tools to allow for a rich reading experience and better story discovery. Genre categories and Tags allowed readers to browse by commonly-used genres, and tags allowed for more finely-tuned ways to discover and share stories.
Built-in Unsplash search allowed authors to easily add compelling photography to their stories, or upload their own story art, and support for multiple chapters allowed authors to publish serialized and novel-length works.
An Author’s Showcase
As I saw how authors were using Curious Fictions, I soon learned it wasn’t just a place to publish stories; it had become a place for authors to showcase their work and their author presence online. I added support for monthly recurring payments, reader comments, and allowed readers to follow authors on the site.
Soon authors began to publish original stories to the site, create posts to share behind-the-scenes content or writing tips, and serialize longer-form content.
Curious Fictions ended after five years, and in that time it featured hundreds of stories and up-and-coming authors.
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