Updates 10/22/2018

Greetings Fellow Writers and Readers;

We’re excited to announce a couple new features that we’ve just released as of moments ago, along with some exciting things coming soon. But first, some methodical musings on money and the state of web-based businesses.

Internet businesses, like all other businesses, require capital to run. There are server expenses, engineering expenses, legal expenses, marketing expenses, and many other expenses, too expansive to enumerate. Companies like Facebook and Twitter, which claim to be “forever free,” are not. While users may not have to pay for access to their services, somebody does have to pay the bills. In the case of Facebook, it is the advertisers who assume that responsibility. As such, the end users of Facebook are not its customers, the advertisers are. So rather than selling a service to users, Facebook sells its users’ data to advertisers. That business model has always seemed a bit disingenuous to us. While there is nobility in offering a service at no cash cost, it’s inaccurate to claim that it’s “free.” With that in mind, we decided early on to take a two-pronged approach with Prose, seeking the best of both worlds. For those of you who don’t want to pay for access to Prose, you don’t have to. Advertisers cover that cost for you. But for those of you can afford $6/month, who don’t want to see advertisements, we offer Prose Gold.

In our ideal world, all of you would subscribe to Gold. That would allow us to focus all of our effort on doing what we really care about doing - creating the best possible site for social writing and reading - rather than splitting our resources between building what you need and what advertisers need.

One criticism we’ve seen from time to time is that we only care about our Gold subscribers, or that we only care about making more money. This could not be farther from the truth. We care about words and stories, writers and readers, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and Prose.

With that in mind, our latest set of features is designed to add a bit more value to our Gold subscription service, both to sweeten the deal for existing subscribers and perhaps encourage a few more of you to consider subscribing.

New Feature: Fonts

We’ve added the option to change the font of your posts, and change your default “reading font.” When publishing a new post, Gold subscribers will see an option to select a font. This font will not display in feeds, but will display when the full post is opened. We’ve also added a new setting on the account settings (https://theprose.com/settings) page called “reading font.” This will change the default font of all posts to a font of your choosing. Give it a try, let us know what you think! If you have any favorite fonts you’d like to see added, please let us know in the comments below.

New Feature: Platinum

Platinum is a new tier of subscription, intended for our most enthusiastic Prose fans. It offers little more than Gold, other than a badge on your profile, but goes a long ways towards supporting the development and growth of Prose. If you’re currently subscribed to Gold and would like to upgrade, you can do so at https://theprose.com/settings/subscription.

Coming Soon: Dark Theme

We’re currently working on a new “Dark Theme” that will switch all the bright whites on Prose to a darker palette more suitable for nighttime reading. You may have seen similar features on YouTube or the mot recent update to macOS. This feature will be exclusive to Gold and Platinum subscribers.

Coming Soon: Center Justification

We used to allow you to center-justify content you wrote. We removed this during a big site overhaul and just haven’t had time to reinstate the feature. Rest assured, it’ll be back soon.

Coming Soon: Challenge Improvements

We want to drastically improve our challenge system by offering better ways to sort and find challenges, along with enhanced visibility for challenges with attached prizes. We also want to allow challenges with multiple entries.

Coming Soon: Challenge of the Month

November will mark the return of our “Challenge of the Month.” We’ll be offering $100 prizes each month for our favorite entry. We’ll also be submitting all outstanding entries to our publishing partners (we are talking to some very big players).

Improvement: Publishing Options

We’ve simplified the publishing options a bit, improving the UI and removing the distinction between “gold status” and “pricing strategy,” which we thought were a bit redundant.

Improvement: Author Browsing

We’ve added a couple new ways to browse authors at https://theprose.com/explore/people. The "Just Joined" category will display the newest folks to register on Prose. The "Need Followers" category will display people who've been writing a lot, but could use a few more followers. Consider giving them a look!

Bug Fix: Books

We found a bug that prevented new books from being created. That’s been fixed.

Feedback and Suggestions

We recognize it’s been a bit difficult or inconsistent for you to supply us with your feedback. Prose is for you, and we’re making it a priority to make sure we hear and reply to all of your feedback and suggestions. With that in mind, the best way to reach us is to email us at info@theprose.com. You can also publish a post with your feedback if you wish, but make sure to tag @A, @Z, and @Prose in the comments after you do so we don’t miss it. If you think it would be helpful, we can also create a dedicated feedback form where you can submit ideas. If you have any quick suggestions, please feel free to leave them in the comments section on this post.

That’s it for now folks. We hope this sheds some light on what we’ve been working on and where we’re headed. Please let us know what you think!

Prose.