March 11, 2010
We’re big fans of SXSW Interactive here at Fourth Story Media, and this year we thought that in addition to attending the festivities, and sitting on a panel, we’d try out a little storytelling experiment…
Starting this Friday, March 12th at 10 AM central time, we’ll be hosting an interactive storytelling exquisite corpse-esque competition over at The Future of the Story. How it works:
- Follow us on Twitter to receive the kickoff sentence for each story (contributed by some of your favorite web storytellers)
- @ reply to @itwasadarkand with what you think happens next; your sentence will show up here
- Vote up the best sentence
- Every round, the winning sentence becomes part of the story and it’s time to write the next!
Once each story closes, we’ll be adding it to our story archive where it will be given a title and illustrated by Figure-1. AND (just to make things super extra saucy fun) we’ll be choosing one contributor from each story at random to win a choice of radtastic books (either Miranda July’s Learning to Love You More, or Jeffrey Zeldman’s A Book Apart), AND the original, signed illustration that accompanied their story!
Anyone and everyone is invited to play. We’ll be starting things off easy with two stories on Friday (new lines added approximately every 30 minutes, second story up around 4 PM), and we’ll ramp up from there depending on how feverishly you type. If you’re at
SXSW, be sure to look for our buttons inside of your Big Bags, and watch for FSM’s
Lisa Holton and
Erin Kissane handing out our limited edition totes (both pictured here). Whoohoo! UPDATE:
The first story “Bearly Noir” is complete! Read it now.
Read all of the finished stories!
March 9, 2010
Market My Words Interviews TAP
Shelli (@srjohannes) from Market My Words has a two-part interview (part one, part two) with FSM’s Creative Development & Marketing Director Ariel Aberg-Riger about marketing The Amanda Project. It’s quite long (but chock full)! A small taste:
What are the top 3 reasons The Amanda Project interactive model works for readers?
- Most importantly, it’s an amazing, well-written story. We have fantastic, bestselling YA authors like Melissa Kantor and Laurie Stolarz working collaboratively to create a rich narrative core and to build Amanda’s world. It’s only with such a strong base that we are able to extend the story and invite our readers in to collaborate and interact as well. If they weren’t hooked in the first place, they wouldn’t care!
- It’s a structured creative environment. We find that although the sky really is the limit in terms of what you can invent and who you can be on The Amanda Project, our readers and writers create most readily when we actually impose certain constraints. For example, every Friday we publish a new story on the site, and each week’s story ends with a call to action that asks a very specific question (e.g. Have you ever lied to make people like you? Is this Amanda’s purple ink?) which we find both lowers the barrier to entry for participation (aka the blank page effect), as well as creates a much more cohesive direction for the continuation of the story.
- It’s universal. The Amanda Project deals with issues all teen girls (and anyone, really) can relate to – identity, friendship, difficult decisions, loyalties, secrets, the drama of high school life – so it’s easy to lose yourself in the character you create, and really immerse yourself in Amanda’s world.
February 15, 2010
MediaBistro recently posted this video of Lisa Holton discussing innovations in interactive children’s publishing. Enjoy!
September 24, 2009
“Most Innovative Interactive Fiction Project”
The Austin Children’s Book Examiner has an amazing review of The Amanda Project and Invisible I, calling it “the most innovative interactive fiction project from a major publisher yet:”
The first book in this series, Invisible I, is fantastic and gets you engrossed in the mystery right from the start. The website is well designed and packed with fun and engaging features. With eight books planned, one can only assume that more will be added to the site as well (such a dynamic website couldn’t stay the same for that long). There is so much potential in this project and the idea that readers get to actually help create the mystery as it is written is really innovative and exciting. It’s a perfect interactive project for a teen audience! The ability to actually be a part of the story is fantastic and if HarperCollins starts to incorporate more multi-media content to the website as well it would be a sure winner. There’s so much fun content both in the engaging book and the interactive website that The Amanda Project is really something to check out and keep an eye on as it continues to unfold!
Read the entire article here!