New to Mea: Collaborative ANTHOLOGIES!!!!!!! Fiction & Nonfiction GENRES!!!!!

On our introductory call, a lot of the comments and feedback on our new Mea app circled around two ideas: How can we read together in community while keeping Mea a quiet place to read without social mediaification?

There were a lot of ideas on both sides, but the next morning I woke up with an idea. Something that has already been used by writers and publishers for centuries: Anthologies.

New! Anthologies allow anyone to curate a list of posts and read it together.#

Here's the idea: Anyone on Mea can now curate a list of posts and decide what order they go in. This creates an "Anthology." Readers can collect the Anthology and read the curated list alongside other readers who have collected the same Anthology.

Here's what an Anthology looks like on the site:

At the bottom of each post in an Anthology, you can join a discussion JUST with other people who collected the Anthology, OR view the discussion with everyone who commented on it site-wide.

I think Anthologies answer a lot of the ideas people had for reading with a group. For instance, you'll notice that when you curate an Anthology, you'll be able to choose whether it is public (available to anyone on Mea) or private (available only to people you share the link with). This means you could create an Anthology just for your book club, for your classroom, or for your community of friends if you'd like. The only people you'll see reading the posts or in the discussion thread of a private Anthology is your unique community!

Right now, the money on the site is fake. But we organized it so that anthologies automatically apply a 20% discount for users who purchase the bundle rather than purchasing each post separately. Yes, curators have to pay for the bundle too, if they want to participate in reading it. Writers will be notified to choose their post price, knowing that if added to an Anthology a 20% discount will be applied. Readers don't have to pay for posts they already own and those are removed from the bundle price, they still get 20% off everything else. The curator of an Anthology, meanwhile, earns a 10% affiliate fee on the discounted bundle price. The platform, as it would for everything, earns a 10% fee. Every author whose post has been added to the Anthology gets their share of the other 80% of the bundle price (based on the original price of their articles).

I think this change meets a lot of the ideas on the call—the ability to read together in varying forms—while reading remains a quiet activity on the app, and where the result is higher signal pieces being published. It's in an author's best interest, on this platform, to write something good and evergreen that people might want to collect or read as part of an Anthology. That means work that isn't just relevant this week, but forever. That readers want to add to their personal libraries and add to Anthologies to read with friends or as part of study groups.

And Anthologies will aid in discovery without algorithms!

I created my first anthology here. It's a collection of the first chapters of fiction series on the platform. Come join the anthology, read through it with me and others, and with discussion available only to the group that joins it! Create your own anthologies too!

New! Fiction & Nonfiction categories!#

I've also noticed that it's hard to differentiate between fiction and nonfiction on the site. And this also speaks to some of the concerns Martin raised on the call about being able to tell what you're reading. So I added fiction and nonfiction labels (chooseable from the composer), as well as stronger series and anthology indicators—so you can tell the difference between a standalone post, a post in a series, and a post in an anthology—as well as the ability to filter your feed and libraries based on these different kinds of content!

New fiction indicator 👆🏻

New "Anthology" indicator 👆🏻

New "Series" indicator 👆🏻

All of this is just an experiment and hypothesis—try it out! Create and collect Anthologies! Publish fiction and nonfiction!!! Let us know how it goes in the #mea-media chat channel! We'll be continuing to update the site based on your suggestions and feedback!