PAGELIFE

 

A SOCIAL NETWORK FOR UNPUBLISHED FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

 

 

    Summery

 

Pagelife is a start-up, not-for-profit organisation whose vision is to create a website for writers who want their work published. We will build a platform where writers can share what they are doing with other writers through direct character to character interaction. We will build it as a social network so that it becomes, in effect, a gymnasium for characters. It’s purpose is manifold and serves writer’s needs in the following areas:

 

Characters get to tell their stories.

Characters are effectively induced to give feedback to each other, allowing writers to obtain meaningful experience of operating their characters in as close to a real setting as they can get before publishing. The work and the benefits are mutual and in this way, Pagelife levels the playing field for writers in terms of support, mentor-ship and feedback.

 

Pagelife is a Multi-verse

The implementation Pagelife will follow has been designed with the minimum prejudice. Pagelife makes no assumptions about Genre or about Language. Both are built elastically based on user input and interaction. It will be possible in such a design for any new literary phenomena to completely re-cast the landscape of the literary market, while, at the same time, letting work progress with the same vigour among writers who are being almost completely ignored.

 

Pagelife is an evolving VR facility

Writers not only get to make choices about how they present their work, but will be able to access Pagelife’s artificial intelligence which actively builds algorithms to deliver visual content-making tools, and assistance, between artists.

 

Pagelife will be a User Product owned Network

All Pagelife company assets will be the property of the Characters residing on Pagelife. The Founder, the Programmers, The Funding Partners, the Contributors, the Donors and the Members will all agree to this.

 

 

Development Plan

 

Pagelife plans a four round funding drive.

 

    Funding

 

Round one

Philanthropy Pool 1 – 25000 (repayable)

A Venture capital loan 2 – 25000 (repayable)

 

Round two

UK Arts Council grant – 25000

Venture capital loan 2 – 5000 – 25000 (repayable)

 

Round three

UK Arts council grant – 25000

Philanthropy Pool 2 – 25000 (repayable)

 

Round four

UK Arts council grant – 25000

Venture capital 2 loan 1 /  Philanthropy Pool 3 – 25000 (repayable)

Site Donations - 10000

 

Rounds will be scheduled broadly across six to eight months.

 

 

    Spending

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Pagelife will hire an average of nine programmers over a six month period. They will work on the design, build, testing and commentary of their work and be paid a flat rate of £40000 pro rata.

 

This is a salary budget of £180000. If we are late with the full tested version and we have sufficiently favourable feedback from our users and backers, we will spend up to a further £60000 in order to complete the project.

 

Our minimum budget at 3 months is £53000. Our maximum is £100000.

 

By the half way point we will know if we have a realistic chance of reaching our target. 3 months should be long enough to product an alpha version of the product and we do not expect to any further concerns from our backers after this.

 

Becoming Freeware

Pagelife believes in free and open source software. We are not a business and we do not do business. We are a project and we want to create a service. Our funding sources will be told this and they will agree to Pagelife’s stated conditions about the legalities of what we produce.  We aim to payback all of our backers in 30 months.

 

Marketing

Pagelife needs test data to develop. It does not need it all. This will be a problem and the problem can be simply stated: Origin.

Our strategy will therefore be to spread the word about Pagelife as fast as possible in order to reduce the impact of our own influence on it’s instantiation.

 

    Revenue

 

Pagelife is an all or nothing venture. We will entice members and other users to give us money in the following ways:

 

Unpublished Writers

We recommend a £3 donation if members are happy with our service and feel like helping.

 

Writers/Publishers who obtain a publishing deal through Pagelife

We recommend a donation of 3% of their signing deal. Typically: £10000 advance for the writer.

 

Revenue from publishers on other media

 

Pagelife recommends a 50/50 split on revenue with publishers who independently publish the activities on Pagelife, for instance on YouTube. Pagelife aims to promote their endeavours.

 

Publishers’ Agents

We will charge £1 for every visit. A visit is a planned virtual trip to Pagelife to fly over or land in some Pagelife view whether it it a Genre, a world, or an in-world place or event.

 

 

    Rational of Finance

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Pagelife requires donations from satisfied speculators (writers and publishers) of between £200K and £300K

 

For this to happen Pagelife needs to control a sizeable piece of the Fiction Market.

 

 

    Pagelife Marketing

 

Pagelife plans 3 phases of marketing to be launched at three points in the build:

 

The first will be an invitation to alpha test offered through wiring clubs on a cold call basis. There are hundreds of such clubs up and down the UK alone.

The second will be an offer too Beta test, to the same organisations and others we may have missed in the first round, containing brochure information.

The third will be at the launch of our first batch of published titles featuring the best of the Beta version activity and include the first full Pagelife version.

 

These will take place within Pagelife’s first year of operation. However the target is that we release the third (and standard) version of Pagelife within  months which is the end of our staff budget.

 

    Predicted revenue

 

There are several factors which will make Pagelife a success:

 

The Publishing industry finds Pagelife useful in finding publishable content.

 

Pagelife is intrinsically valuable in fiction development and user supporters funds it voluntarily.

 

Pagelife becomes a shareholder in the global market of new fiction.

 

 

    Product

 

Pagelife will make a free to use and user responsive environment for new characters to find friends.