WriteOn is Amazon’s new collaborative writing service

People who are looking for feedback on their latest writing project now have a way to turn to the wisdom of the crowds. Amazon today announced WriteOn by Kindle, a new collaborative writing platform for authors, in a post on its Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award forums. It’s a tool that’s designed to allow writers to work on their next big project, and share what they’ve done with a community of other creative people to get feedback on their product. Users can post their work, comment on what other people are doing, and connect with a community of other authors using the service’s built-in forums.

Amazon has launched a crowd-editing and -writing service called WriteOn into private beta. In an announcement on the Kindle Author Forums, the company said that the site would act as a “community where readers and writers come together around the creative process to make good stories great and great stories better.” The service allows authors to upload chapters and stories to a central author page (here’s mine) and stories percolate to the top based on popularity and likes. The service has been growing over the summer but only recently came to light publicly thanks to The Digital Reader. It isn’t very full-featured – it’s more of a blogging platform right now – but it looks to be well populated with indie titles. These sorts of services aren’t new but they are potentially lucrative, at least in terms of traffic. Services like Wattpad have millions of users and millions of words uploaded and, to a degree, have spawned some successes. Amazon has attempted to entice indie writers with their Kindle Worlds service, a strange system for uploading and publishing fanfic. WriteOn, however, seems to be aimed at more traditional writing like original fiction and short stories.