Galo A. Vargas
Inkspired Programs
Inkspired Official
The official product blog of Inkspired, with all the news, perks, changes and releases we make.
April went by really fast, and it left us a few wonderful stories to read in our platform, plus some exciting updates to announce. In summary we will talk about the imminent arrival of The Authors' Cup 2019 due to start tomorrow May 2nd, the introduction of our NEW homepage, and the (long-awaited) official release of our revamped Inkspired Mobile app for Android. Let's break it down:
It's happening. After announcing it back in March, tomorrow, the 2nd of May, we are running for the first time what is Inkspired's signature writing/publishing competition. If you don't know what it is about, you can read all the details here. You can sign up on the competition until tomorrow for only US $3.99 and get the chance to compete for up to US $1,000 in prizes.
From the 3rd of May until the 19th of May, you will be able to register for a late-registration fee of US $6.99.
We have designed a "New Home" for all of our users. Whenever you log in to your account, you will see a homepage different to the public homepage for visitors. On this newly designed page, you will find your "recently seen" content, recommendations of what to read, and the new releases on your favorite categories; everything tailored to you and your interests.
Also, now is possible to see all the progress you are making with your "in-progress" stories, announcements of the new writing contests, and if you are participating in The Authors' Cup, you will have quick access to the list of all your current active challenges.
More stuff will be added here from time to time to make your experience using the vast tools and services available of Inkspired as simple as possible.
Yes! We know we got a bit delayed, but our Inkspired Mobile 3 is finally out there at the Google Play Store! iPhone users knows what it brings since January, but in case you haven't checked our detailed mobile's information page, here is a brief summary of what you can expect:
NEW Design
Easier to use, cleaner, and much more practical and user-friendly than ever.
Fantastic new reading experience
The best and simplest experience to read chapters of your favorite novels, book series, and visual stories. Send and reply comments easily on every chapter. Submit your review. Adjust the reading screen with your preferred reading format, font, background color, and much more.
New ways to search stories, browse by categories, filter by hashtags and languages
It has never been easier to find and discover the stories you may want to read on Inkspired. Filter and sort your search results at your convenience, and see relevant content especially tailored to you.
A new and exclusive mobile-only writing format!
Become a star publishing microfiction stories of 500 characters. Direct, simple, and fast to read and write. Discover all the microfictions being posted on Inkspired, or filter them by the author's you are following. This is an exclusive option only available on Inkspired Mobile (on iPhone and Android).
Interact on community groups and create discussions
Join the on-going discussions and conversations happening in the groups of your interest. Participate in the community, start discussions, send and reply comments on the conversations that matter to you.
Organized notifications
Get all your notifications conveniently organized by 'My Account', 'My Stories', and 'Communities'. Easy and quick access to what you want to see from the push notifications on your phone's home screen.
More control in your hands
Post announcements directly from your User Profile. Also, the much improved 'Settings' sections will let you edit your profile conveniently from the app, manage your push notifications preferences, the content language you want to see, and stay up to date with the balance of your Rewards Credits.
New ways to stay updated with the latest news on the platform
Now the app will let you know what's happening currently on Inkspired! The main screen will show a News Bar with the latest news, and it also has a section to browse across all active Writing Contests.
Improved Pocket library and Offline reading
Follow your favorite stories and authors, and see their latest updates conveniently organized on your own library. Your library also lets you access all saved chapters and read them offline wherever you are.
Plus
That's all for now as we are ready to kickstart May firmly.
See you around the community :-)
Best wishes to all,
Galo
Inkspired' CEO
May 1, 2019, 11:59 p.m. 6 Report Embed 29
February is finally over, and this 2019 has just started with amazing things. Today we are finally announcing Inkspired's signature writing competition: The Authors' Cup.
The Authors' Cup is Inkspired's annual creative writing competition made by authors for all authors. On Inkspired we want to motivate all writers and aspiring authors of different literary genres.
This first edition will last 3 months, and it is scheduled to start on May 2, 2019. The Authors' Cup will be open to all countries, languages, literary genres whether is a short story or novel published on Inkspired!
Want to read more? Check The Authors' Cup official page, and register today to benefit from a very special early-bird pricing. If you are a writer or an aspiring author, this is your chance to compete and win up to US $1,000 in prizes.
Within the competition, we also have a special challenge for "The Best Story" with additional awards. We will have a jury reviewing stories in 6 categories in English and Spanish - and who knows, maybe Portuguese as well ;)
Microfictions are getting popular in our new iOS app! And now, you can search, browse, and read them from the website too. We have an entire listing on a microfiction category here. Oh, and did I mentioned that you can also filter them by your preferred language?
By the way, our revamped Android app has had some delays shipping, but it's finally launching shortly and, yes, you can publish your microfictions from there too, in case you were wondering ;)
We were aware that for the past few weeks some of you had some troubles copy/pasting your texts into our web editor. We got reports from random "characters" appearing in the text from time to time, to some delays when saving your chapters. Well, all of those are things of the past now as we have massively improved the performance and fixed those "little tricky bugs" in our editor, to make your stay on Inkspired even more pleasant and trustworthy :)
Since we are working hard improving our technology and growing community every day, we are also expanding our story catalog to 2 new categories: Historical Fiction (actually, "the return of"), and Scripts/Screenplay. The former was very much missed when we took it out early last year, but we have listened to you, and it has now come back to stay! The latter, Scripts/Screenplay, also comes in with a new writing format that you can experiment with from now on in Inkspired. Be creative, and have fun reading and writing in a new genre and style :-)
The Rewards Program has been a massive success since its introduction last year. Since then, we have had dozens of thousands of users adopting it, earning Rewards Credits, and exchanging them for perks and benefits on our Self-Publishing page. Since it has become like the internal currency of Inkspired "kind-of", now we are going to let you purchase packages of Rewards Credits which, by the way (spoiler alert), might be very handy when competing on The Authors' Cup in the near future.
Also, talking about the Self-Publishing services, we have updated our price list.
Last but not least. Having a fancy platform is not enough in today's world, it also has to perform well and bring the best user experience to everyone. We have invested efforts in making things faster for you, and we are sure you can notice the difference now. When it comes to helping you achieve things, faster is always better ;)
On Inkspired we are constantly improving on all fronts, but we can't do by ourselves. Listening and trusting our community has always been our best way to do things, and here we still are with open ears eager to listen to any feedback or comments you may have.
Best wishes,
Galo A. Vargas
Inkspired' CEO
March 1, 2019, 1:48 p.m. 5 Report Embed 35
And we wanted to start by saying Thank You. We are very happy to have you on board at Inkspired, and we want to thank you once again for all your support during the amazing ride back in good old 2018. It has been a fabulous year of growth, learnings, and excitement. It couldn't have been a better as our community continued to grow, and we focused all our energy on making the best products for reading and writing online fiction; our greatest reward was to witness how the community embraced all these changes with a lot of enthusiasm. You can expect even more on 2019.
Furthermore, we couldn't have ended the year without making new announcements.
This 2019 started with a brand new release. Our long-awaited new app for iOS (iPhone) has made it to the Apple App Store with a revamped new design and most of all the wonderful things that make the Inkspired platform so special. And as beautiful, easier-to-use, and sophisticated it could be, the biggest news is the release of a unique writing format, totally exclusive to the mobile apps, called Microfictions.
To fully read about all the new features of our app, check out the Inkspired Mobile page. By the way, the Android version of the app is going to be released on the Google Play Store in February 2019.
Microfictions are story types with only 500 characters. And today we are bringing you the ability to read and write this beautiful short and compelling stories, like a mini Twitter-for-fiction, exclusively from our Mobile app.
Getting your way around this new writing format is easy. To read microfictions, just go to the central tab of the app, where you can find to sub tabs called "All" and "My feed". Under "All", you will find all the microfictions published in your preferred language, whilst under "My feed" you will find all the microfictions published by authors you are following.
To write a microfiction, just tap on the "Write" button on the right upper corner of that screen. Add a Microfiction title, choose a language, add up to 3 describing #hashtags, write an amazing story under 500 characters, and hit "Publish". That's it. Easy, fast, and convenient. Exploit your creativity with very short narrative constraints wherever you go, at any time.
Note: Writing and publishing full-length stories, books, novels, and short tales is still available only in our Website and Inkspired Writer app (Mac/Windows), but will be available shortly in the Mobile apps during the second quarter of 2019.
Last year was full of wild rides, new experiments, releases, product upgrades, and also community growth. Inkspired is solidifying itself as one of the best writing and reading spaces in the world.
Just to name a few things, we have released new Mobile apps, new self-publishing services, academy videos and webinars, created monthly writing contests, introduced the Rewards Program, introduced Verification of Stories, created Community Guidelines, launched Writer Premium, re-designed 8 new book cover templates in 7 colors, integrated a new smarter Editor, incorporated French and German translations, and became one of the most important writing & reading communities in the world, specially strong in the Spanish and Portuguese languages. Plus, vast improvements in our product design in all fronts, and many other small details that are left unmentioned but you should have probably noticed ;) All of that with the help and constant feedback from you.
Well, if there has been ever a lot of expectations for Inkspired, this 2019 we are going to deliver what is the best to come yet. New services, new products, new competitions, even better mobile apps, new webinars, new content, new smart technologies, and many more surprises that will take our readers and writers to an unprecedented level. With new European offices (in Luxembourg and Spain) plus the ones already in South America (Ecuador and an upcoming office in Brazil) Inkspired is ready to keep innovating in the writing and publishing spaces and expand globally.
From the Inkspired Team, we wish you the best of starts of this new year.
Galo
Inkspired,"Stories that will inspire you"
Hi everybody! It's that time of the month when we do our routine catch up about all the new things that we have been adding to Inkspired during the month. Let's get started!
Undoubtedly, the biggest and most impactful change on Inkspired during November. We have finally improved the overall experience of uploading cover pictures, we have added new beautiful designs with amazing colored templates and filters, and that's not all. We have also incorporated 2 new formats plus the classic vertical book cover. You can now upload a horizontal promo banner which will help your story get promoted in several other places around the platform. And that's not all, the new story background banner lets you personalize your story profile. The latter will also be incorporated in your User Profile soon!
We have been listening to you. We know everyone has a favorite payment method, and we have just incorporated one of the most popular to make things easier for you when checking out. From today, it's possible to pay for your Self-Publishing services and your Writer Premium Subscriptions not only with a credit card, but also using your own PayPal account. If you have been waiting for it to upgrade, try it now :)
We care about the user experience of our community as much as making our platform more secure, every day. Adding another secure way to pay online is a step forward to that.
On the same line, we are aware that some of you signed up on Inkspired using your social networks, but at some point, you want to change that. Now it's possible to "unlink" any social account that was used while registering (be it Facebook or Twitter) and set up a new access password to your account.
If you want to do it, it's very simple. Just go to Settings > Edit Profile. If you have used Facebook or Twitter as a registration method, at the start of your profile you will see a link that will allow you to start the process to unlink and set up your password.
Many of you have noticed a green or red bar on top of the website from time to time. That's our new "news" flash. It's a very simple way to keep you all posted on emerging top releases on-site. By the way, if you want to dismiss it, you just need to click on the bar and it will be gone for good :)
Every time you share an announcement or update now it will be posted on a highlighted location in your public user profile. And that's not all, now it's possible to make comments on each announcement :) Wanted to engage with your audience? This is an ideal form of keep all your stories' followers updated with your new releases, and start conversations about it.
We got started with the last phase of our platform translation with the aim to make you feel at home, covering the only thing that was left to translate: our e-mail notifications. Soon you can expect clear e-mails in your preferred language (English, Spanish and Portuguese to get started), and also more useful notifications about your own writing progress, your stories' interactions, and reading recommendations.
Not much to elaborate on this, but we have added the support form back to the left menu bar on your Dashboard. In case you need immediate assistance, you know where to go now :)
A very long expected update on our mobile apps is just around the corner. Yes, finally we are making a major release fixing all the multiple issues with the current version, and keep it more in line to our website's look & feel and capabilities. You will not have to wait long. The iOS new release will make it to the App Store around the Christmas holidays, and the Android new release will be available on the Google Play Store in January 2019.
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