For some time now, you’ve been hearing about Catch & Release, a mysterious project somehow relating to words, paper, and stories.
After months of hard work – writing, editing, coding, promoting, debating – it is time for the Big Reveal.
The Catch & Release Project has evolved into Catchn: Setting Stories Free. As it started out, it’s a simple idea: Catch a story, then set a new idea free. Share work from your own creative depths, and explore the work of others. Promote authors you love, and make contacts with new ones. Come together to advance the idea of the story, instead of relying on traditional publishing to make choices for you based on marketability and placement.
In today’s world, a trend that Bethany and I have noticed is that it’s increasingly more and more difficult to find good flash fiction, short stories, poetry, or one-act plays being distributed or published. Unless you are an already established author, it can be horrifically hard to find a place that will accept your short story or poem.
And if you write drabbles or drabble series, you can probably forget it. The 100 word story form is popular on blogs but not so with the publishing world at large.
So what’s a writer to do?
Aside from that, what’s a reader supposed to do when you’re stuck on a train with no book and only your iPhone or other mobile device and you want to read something but don’t know what? You could attempt one of the fanfiction sites, but you take your life in your hands there, depending on the site you visit. It’s not at all uncommon to find fanfics with horrible grammatical errors and very thin plots.
So how does an author get their work out there, to build a following that might allow them to publish? You go online. But that takes a lot of legwork – you have to build an audience for your blog, and attract people to YOUR writing over everyone else’s – if they even know you’re there.
Catchn is a possible solution to this, benefiting everyone. A place where readers can go to find original short fiction, poetry, and plays, and where authors can gain exposure for their work while playing around with formats and ideas. Authors will retain all rights; the only thing given up is nonexclusive electronic reprint rights.
It will be free to both readers and writers, but there will be a submissions process and editorial board in place, just as at a mainstream literary journal or magazine.
Quality is key here – subpar work will not be published on the site. However, rather than getting a standard rejection form, work that is rejected will be commented upon, and any rejected author will be given a login for a locked forum on the site called “The Workshop.” In this forum, active writers from the site and a group of editorial board members will be present to offer workshopping advice and constructive criticism for any rejected author who wishes to take advantage of it to revise and resubmit. The quality control process isn’t meant to make this an exclusive club that revels in rejection – it’s meant to give aspiring writers a way to improve their work for the future. Another way to interact, another way to grow, another way to prosper as a community of readers and writers.
Again…social publishing. Bringing together a community, and sharing work that’s valued for its creativity, instead of determining the value of a work based on its form, its marketability, its commercial potential.
Today marks the launch of the beta. It’s rough-and-ready, nothing terribly refined or elegant just yet. But it works, it’s pretty darn searchable, and it has the basic functionality we want. In the future, as I build my web-development skills, I’m hoping to add more of the social-networking functions Catchn needs to really flourish – forums, individual news feeds on author pages, things like that. Someday, I’d love for it to have an Amazon/Netflix-like recommendation engine, too.
All of that will be coming. We hope to bring you an exciting, constantly evolving platform to play with and enjoy.
In the meantime, we have a beta. YOU have a beta. Let’s do this!
Come on in. Take a look. Sign up to read, or submit a story you’ve got lying around. Join in. Let’s see what happens.