News Corp-owned HarperCollins this morning put out a release about the launch of Inkpop.com, an interactive writing platform for teens. Which caught us off guard, because the U.S. publisher had already soft-launched the website on its Authonomy blog on November 24, 2009.
Anyway: Inkpop is a project from HarperTeen, HarperCollins Publishers’ teen publishing unit. The platform aims to attract young readers and writers with a combination of community publishing features, user-generated content, and social networking elements.
In addition, the company has engaged a group of international HarperCollins editors and authors to function as some sort of ‘editorial board’ whose job it is to review the site’s top five monthly selections, provide teens with feedback and mentorship opportunities, while also considering their work for publication.
Susan Katz, President and Publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books, said: “Teens are a key consumer group with significant financial impact. Teen fiction is one of the most robust and fastest-growing categories in publishing today.”
Since its fairly quiet debut in November 2009, Inkpop has attracted more than 10,000 members, who have submitted close to 11,000 novels, poems, essays, and short stories. HarperCollins says visitors are teens ages 13 and older, from 109 different countries and territories (which is strange, because the site is available in English only).
HarperCollins says it will announce partnerships throughout the year that will further enrich the inkpop community experience for teen members. The publishers says it’s working on bringing other formats such as photography, video and artwork sharing to Inkpop, in order to enhance projects and promote additional forms of creativity.
