In 2010, I entered university with a primary focus, I wanted to learn all the stuff that I needed to build a community website for writers. This was based on my experience with a site where young people like me started writing, shared their work and created a fun community. Few years earlier the website shut down and I wanted to recreate it and make it even better.

There were additional motivations that crystallized during my studies and as the first iterations of the website were built. These were primarily technical aspects with which I won't bore you here. At that time I was already dissatisfied with the quality of content that traditional power houses of Western culture were producing. This dissatisfaction has only increased since then. As a technical person I turned my attention towards the technical aspects. As a science fiction and fantasy fan my focus was always on large story universes. Think Star Gate, Star Wars, The Expanse, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Gundam and so on. But when reading and writing the details, the encyclopedia of the universe lives completely separately. This was the first realization I had and at that moment my desire to create a publication website where writers just publish their content and create community evolved into something greater and it didn't stop there.

After a few iterations on how to bring the universe encyclopedia together with the stories I had a working demo and could focus on other things. Back in 2016 the publishing industry was already adjusting to the rise of e-books and audio books were coming on the scene. In East Asia the Light Novel format manifested itself on the Internet as Web Novels and became the first step for many aspiring authors. Patreon platform showed a new model for people to support their favorite creators and many inventions were coming, but at the cost of increasing challenges and overhead.

Even if there was a solution for a new challenge like Patreon in the end one ends with multiple tools and websites to use. For writers who should be primarily focused on creating great stories, the bar for entry keeps on rising unless they get lucky and get a solid publishing deal or get noticed on mass platforms like Wattpad. From my first internship I became passionate about small businesses and creators and my vision became to create a platform where even the small writers can make something if they create a good story. It might not be enough to go full-time (maybe over time), but at least it might be something to make life easier and motivate me to write better stories. And don't even get me started on the legal issues, revenue splitting and other aspects of what is essentially a business (after all those creating stories, art and music also need to eat). As such the all-in-one platform concept was born with the name Literary Universe.

Now to the present day, as sadly I was able to return to it in a larger capacity only recently. As I'm toiling away on the Literary Universe and preparing it for introduction to a wider audience a major new challenge arises, Artificial Intelligence. At first a fun toy that many laughed at and said it would take decades before it was any good, but these voices are growing more silent. Even domains which seemed untouchable a few years ago like programming and the creative fields are now feeling endangered. From what I already talked with writers it already has had a negative impact on literary contests where submissions were swarmed by AI generated stories and publishers have to contend with these as well. Many things to talk about in this area (already started a bit, but more to come), but I believe that in this crisis there is tremendous opportunity. Even AI will need human input or it will start on a deadly spiral at which end it will generate garbled nonsense like we have seen in the past as it only has its own content to draw new content from.

The opportunity here is that AI can provide assistance to writers. While the technology can be used even today to already generate impressive works, human editing is often required, but that too will decrease as the technology evolves. But at the end of the day we will need human generated creative works. Not just for the AI not to degenerate, but for us as a species, less we degenerate as well. With this the demand for high quality content is going to increase. That is going to make it harder for new authors to make it, but this is where AI can help them the most. As an assistant AI will be able to point out issues with things like dialog flow, plot holes and even offer suggestions based on analysis of similar works, in the most extreme scenario I can imagine it writing some some encyclopedia entries from based on the story that the author has written to save author some time. Due to the interconnection of all the tools in the Literary Universe the AI will have all the necessary data to go beyond general suggestions that can be already provided these days and will be able to offer assistance through the entire creative process. But at the end of the day it needs to stay as an assistant, or authors will become nothing more than glorified AI query writers.

The vision of Literary Universe has evolved from an all-in-one platform for creative writing, publishing and community building to include all the other tools needed in the publishing business like legal arrangements, more revenue to writers and sharing it with everyone involved, translations, author blogs, fan clubs, education and now looking towards the future with harnessing the power of AI without losing the human element and creativity.

So where are things now? Literary Universe has the basic things down. Next major feature on our to-do list are Fan Clubs, followed by selling stories. In the meantime a new theme is being implemented. We are a small and at this point still bootstrap operation (would like to keep it that way if you would support us). If this is something that interests you, take a look, give us feedback, check out our roadmap and please subscribe to one of our plans to support us so that we can reach our vision faster. Feel free to use promo code STORYTELLERSTART to get one month free on any of the plans.