Every website is different: the people behind it, their business model, what they hope to achieve in the long run. In keeping with principle #7 below, I think you should be presented with this information upfront, so you can decide if this is a place where you want to invest your time.

Best wishes and happy writing,

Bill Katz, Founder and Chief Peon

The Writertopia Manifesto

Writertopia is founded on these principles:

1. Writertopia is designed, from the ground up, to meet the needs of the writing community. We are focused on making this website a central resource for writers on the web.
2. You should be able to easily retrieve the information you enter into Writertopia. It's your data. We will provide tools to download portfolio and submission data in a variety of formats.
3. Writertopia is focused on our members' professional development. We will actively recruit writers who are trying to hone their abilities and receive feedback on their work. We want our best members to invite others who will help build a collaborative, skilled community.
4. Writertopia should be able to accomodate different workshop styles. One size does not fit all. We will work with workshop moderators to create workflows that can be shared with others. In some cases, it may be too difficult to adapt a real-world worshop style to an online presence, but as much as possible, we will build our platform to the needs of writers.
5. Rather than force intermingling of writers with conflicting interests and skill levels, Writertopia will provide a flexible infrastructure for a spectrum of niches. Workshops can be as exclusive or inclusive as the moderator wishes in regard to genre and workshop entrance requirements.
6. Although there is a tradeoff between customizability and simplicity of use, Writertopia's interface should become more intuitive over time through analysis and redesign. The complexity of new features should be relatively hidden but accessible to interested writers. This is critical in welcoming all writers, regardless of their ease with technology.
7. Writertopia members are partners, not customers. The business should be as transparent as possible so our members know why we are using particular methods and not others. We agree with many of the points championed by the book “The Cluetrain Manifesto.” We actively solicit advice and feedback from our members. This era of rapidly developing technology and interconnectivity will yield novel ways of structuring business, and by listening to our members, we can analyze and selectively try new ways of helping the writing community.
8. We believe that Writertopia can provide free core services to the writing community, while remaining profitable by unobtrusively selling valuable ancillary services and receiving associate fees from great websites like Amazon and Audible. If we build a compelling service in a prudent, bootstrapped manner, we will have many avenues for revenue.
9. The technology behind Writertopia must be reliable and focused on providing the best experience to writers. Our goal is to leverage the trends of escalating internet connectivity, cheap computing power, open source software, and upcoming e-paper devices to create a thriving community of creative writing workshops, both online and in the real-world.
10. Some of the initiatives at Writertopia will be untested concepts, like the algorithms for rating story feedbacks and community contributions. We don't know it all and we'll have to tune ideas. But over time, with our commitment to the above principles and help from the writing community, we can build something special. If we make a mistake, our community will let us know, and we will listen to them.

Our Technology

It's a great time to be a web entrepreneur. A thriving open-source community continues to push web development technology. Here are some business and technology buzzwords that apply to Writertopia: the long tail, Ruby on Rails, Linux, MySQL, lighttpd, AJAX, Web 2.0, REST, tagging, folksonomy, social networking, participation, bootstrapping, CSS, Prototype, Behaviour.

The Team

We are a bootstrapped operation with a small, part-time staff supplemented by occasional paid consultants. Writertopia will survive because we won't incur costs we can't afford or hire folks before there's sufficient revenue.

Writertopia is the brainchild of Bill Katz, a fledgling writer and grand prize winner of the 2003 Writers of the Future speculative fiction contest. Bill was a research professor of Neurosurgery and, with his colleagues, founded a software company later acquired by Varian Medical Systems. He left his Senior Scientist position at Varian a few years ago to study creative writing, tinker with computers & software, and explore some business ideas that turned into Writertopia. His personal website is at billkatz.com.

Joining him on the Writertopia team is Jennifer Yoon, his wife and a former Senior Manager at KPMG Consulting. She holds an MBA from the University of Chicago.