Five Friend Friday & Collections
Greetings, Prosers!
What a week it’s been this week. Not only have we had the launch of The Prose Collections, but we've also had our first Five Friend Friday.
Five Friend Friday is where we share a Prose piece with five people of our choosing through whichever social media or communications channel we fancy using the #FFF hashtag.
The thinking behind this is to spread the word of what we think should be shared as well as Prose as a community itself. The share facility has always been on any posts on Prose, and the majority of you use them; but we thought we’d take it a step further.
This week I shared a piece on Twitter that was written by myself (@PaulDChambers).
This wasn't just for vanity’s sake. As someone who has struggled at times with depression, this was a poem that helped me at the time when I was on the brink of another dabble with the black dog. It’s always there, but I didn’t let it in on this occasion, and so the poem was borne of triumph.
To share it seemed apt after our recent trips to prison where the struggle with mental health is a daily battle, as well as our @ShadowCounselor launch to assist where our Prosers may also be facing their own issues. This poem's link is attached.
We also had a concern raised about what to do if Prosers didn’t want the share buttons on their work to be used to widen their readership through #FFF and generally. The option has always been there, so it isn’t something we can stop others doing; but it is something that you can stop happening by using the hashtag #dontshare
Other than that, please share away to five friends and more as long as the pieces don’t have the #dontshare hashtag on them. We have a world of words that people should be reading and adding to - let's make people aware of them and it.
The Prose Collections
Now onto the changes on the site. We hope you’ve liked them and the new features as much as we do. Some seriously hard work has gone into the new version.
Now, as much as you can test the functionality of an update, which we did extensively; sometimes things don’t become apparent until a community as massive as Prose gets to play with it in real time.
Like any release (did someone say Apple?), we are aware of a few bugs that we will get sorted as soon as we can. However, one element of a major new feature where Prose Partners can create books within the app for the purpose of selling either as a whole or in chapters has issues.
The good news is that you can load as many as you wish, but you can currently only see the first ten chapters. This is an easy fix, so it will be corrected swiftly and with great importance.
Secondly, at the moment if a chapter is not for general consumption (IE, it will be on sale soon) you have to choose ‘me only’ or ‘unpublished’ in the privacy settings until the pricing feature is in place.
The privacy settings where you do this are at the top, under ‘options’ and ‘visibility’ for ‘me only’ or ‘status’ for the ‘unpublished’ option. However, if you do not intend to charge, publish away for all to see. Non partners, if you wish to release your book as a whole and not per chapter, you should also use these settings in the same way.
As soon as these bugs are dealt with, we will let you know. If there are any others you need to make us aware of, please use the normal channels of direct messages here or at info@theprose.com