Oolipo

While I’ve heard of a Wattpad and Medium, I’d not heard of Oolipo until a digital meeting which basically came down to: How can writers make money from working in digital.

This is a hard question to answer, and none of us had a real way to approach it. Sure, we can teach people to write for radio, or games, or magazines and blogs, but how can they make money without using the fame machine of the internet and rely on advertising? I have been so recently immersed in social media as a publishing tool (beyond marketing) I admit I had trouble thinking of ways that authors could use digital platforms to make money right off the bat.

But when a colleague mentioned Oolipo, my publishing senses tingled. I love a good wordplay on a French writing technique (oulipo) that I began to explore in my previous research, so I wanted to know more.

There’s not yet a whole lot about it, to be honest. There’s an article in the Bookseller by Molly Flatt, that intrigues, with quotes from one of the founders, Ryan David Mullins, with tantalising bits like: “We don’t create stories and then ship them through the pipes to our users. We’re creating a new kind of platform that will give passionate story – and media – lovers an experience native to their mobile devices.” (From the Bookseller)

It sounds good, great even. I can imagine myself going into a story, reading about a place and being able to see it, literally, on a map, and hear the sounds of a cricket (yes, all my stories take me back to the south of the States), and give me a really immersive digital experience. To be honest, though. I need to see it to know if I’ll like it. I love digital books and stories, but I also love simply reading a traditional book where you use your imagination to develop the atmosphere, the scene. It never ceases to amuse me when the film visualisations of a character in a book is so different than what I’d been imagining.

I’m absolutely certain there will be an audience for Oolipo and other sites that will (and are) piggybacking off similar ideas. I’m also sure that more digital storytelling will go this way as the digital natives seek out books and stories in ways that are more in tune with their (our) digital lives. The idea that if a story can’t be interacted with via social, why bother? (or come from social, in the case of my research)

And, I have to wonder how it’s going to work. In the Bookseller article there is mention of breaking text up into digestible chunks with the author having the option of being able to change all the fonts, colours, include graphics, etc in to each section. Could this be too much of a good thing? A place where each character voice has a different font and colour scheme if the author wanted? While this may help get people into a story and give subtle cues about the plot (imagine a character who slowly loses their mind having their font sizes get subtly smaller or more erratic as the story progresses), I have the feeling it would annoy me more than help me. Perhaps I’m old school and find beauty in the stories we tell ourselves while reading.

But maybe that’s the charm of Oolipo: it opens up stories beyond words.

Oolipo’s site is pretty bare bones at the moment. But that’s to be expected if it’s just launching. I’ve signed up to join, though, and am waiting for my batch invitation to give it a go. In the meantime, I’ll need to update my social media timeline.