RSS feeds are now live on all Pandamian accounts. Ray Chuan has reported that the multiple books feature is ready on the backend, but we’ve yet to hook it up properly to the UI and test it to make sure things don’t break.

It should be ready by the end of the week, though. (I know I’ve said that before, but it should be true this time around!)

We’ve just released a cool new feature, already available in all Pandamian accounts: fullscreen writing. You’ll now notice an ‘expand’ icon on the top right corner of both the Write Chapter and Write Page screens, which you can click to launch a no-distractions writing environment.

The normal writing interface looks like this:

And once you’ve clicked the expand icon, the interface looks like this:

(Oh yes, we’re obsessed with giving writers the best publishing experience they can possible have.)

If you’re curious as to what else we’re up to, here are the top three features that we have on our todo (in descending level of importance):

1. eBook conversion
2. Multiple books per author
3. A crude site-wide directory

The Pandamian team’s struggling with eBook conversion right now, but expect small feature releases (like this one!) over the next few weeks.

Have you ever had that gut feeling that things will turn out well because of the people you are working with? Call me optimistic, but the reason I have a good feeling about Pandamian is not only because users are giving us encouraging feedback but also because of the team dynamics.

At the beginning of the development, direction was mainly based on Eli’s word. And that was hard to swallow for the rest of us because our efforts were invested based on a single person’s word, probably harder for Yipeng because he did not know Eli as well as I did (and he was putting in more work as the technical lead). So most of the heated arguments were between Eli and Yipeng regarding feature development priority. We used to have meetings every week where technical terms were being thrown around for a full two hours, which caused  me to be frequently lost (it took me a couple of months to actually figure out that “CMS” meant Content Management System. I felt like Eduardo in The Social Network when he confessed to his girlfriend that he did not know how to change his relationship status on Facebook), just to settle on what features to implement first.

As Pandamian took shape and things began to fall into place, I guess everyone became more comfortable with each other. We learnt how each other worked and trust grew, something that is very important. People were left to carry out their own responsibilities, meetings grew less frequent (not sure if that is bad) but the development progressed pretty smoothly. I guess all those arguments set the stone for something stronger. It created the binding chemistry for the team. We now have an understanding regarding each other’s take on Pandamian and realize that this drives the development to be more wholesome. We argue not because we oppose each other, but because we sees a weakness and think that it can be better implemented. Yes, Eli is still OCD about design, Yipeng still works his magic silently, Ray Chuan adds more technical skills and I still dream of the big bucks. But we all work towards a common goal, creating something that will change the way writers write and, eventually, the way people read.

We’ve just fixed a fairly significant bug today that involved web addresses and the ability to view your book. Long story short - several writers had entered capital letters for their Pandamian site URLs, and our software couldn’t figure out which book to display when the user visited his or her own front page.

Yipeng, one of our co-founders, has contacted all the users whose accounts were affected to tell them of the fix. Thankfully only a handful of users were affected, but even then I am very, very thankful to the user who pointed it out to us (and by accident, to boot!).

You guys make us awesome. No really, you do!

This post was originally posted to Novelr.com (Eli James’s blog on publishing and the web)

It’s been a week since we launched Pandamian, and I’ve got a few quick notes on how we’ve fared.

User Feedback

There’s this mantra in startup-land that applies to product launches: you know you’ve launched too late when you’re not embarrassed by your product.

By that metric, I suspect that we’ve taken far too long to launch. Our early users are rather happy with what we’ve built, and (surprising - to me, at least) most of them are understanding that we don’t yet have feature X or Y.

And I’m not complaining about that. Most of them have made it clear that they’re expecting a host of new features, and every other day or so we get tweets or emails asking us about feature X, or bug Y, or how to do Z.

(I also suspect that the writers who are currently moving their work to Pandamian are doing it because we’re working to add ebook conversion. And maybe that’s a good reason to have your book on Pandamian. But at the same time I’m embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t ready for the launch. )

What’s taken me most by surprise, however, are the number of requests for a directory of Pandamian books. We’d built Pandamian with the writer/publisher in mind, and so the idea of a browsing tool was a little … startling, to say the least.

I’m for building a Pandamian directory, but I also think we should delay implementing it immediately. After all, we’ve yet to complete:

1. Adding multiple books per author
2. Adding the ability to upload and use cover-art (which is really a nice way of saying: set up a method to handle static objects like images)
3. Theming
4. Feeds
5. Complete ebook conversion

And several of these features are non-trivial to implement. (Also: remember that a directory is itself a non-trivial thing to build, if we’re to do it right). And so I think we should put up a crude, stop-gap solution to this, and come back to fix it up properly in the future. Probably better to focus on one thing at a time.

Press Coverage

We’ve not publicized Pandamian as much as we could, and that’s exactly the way I like it. Right now the really tricky thing is to build something people would use (or really: that writers would love to use), and we only need about a hundred users to source feedback from.

Which, by the way, we have.

I think it’s important to take the time to get the software right, before scaling it up for people. Quantity is easy to scale; happiness is not. And so it’s a better idea to maximize the latter at this stage, before thinking about sheer numbers.

Why We’re Doing This

I think it’s worth revisiting why we’re building Pandamian, just to put the hectic programming of the past week in perspective. I recently wrote about Amanda Hocking, this amazing 26 year old writer who’s found success on the Amazon Kindle store. What people tend to forget is that she spent a hellish amount of time researching ebooks before publishing to Amazon, that she did all the book-covers herself, and she took a significant amount of time to study J.A. Konrath’s publishing blog.

I’m encouraged by her story, but I also realize that for the majority of writers, there remains a rather formidable technical learning-curve to publish to the web. (I spoke about this challenge at the Internet Archive late last year). We’ve seen our fair share of writers struggling with blog engines, and web design, and site templates, here in the web fiction community, and it’s never nice to have to stop writing to deal with tech.

My contention, however, is that it’s necessary to make publishing easy and available to everyone, and it is the fastest, most efficient way to force publishers to change.

If we can make it possible for writers to publish without ever worrying about the underlying technology, and we can make it such that they really, truly own the distribution of their own books; then - I think - we would have accomplished something meaningful.

To make our user service delivery better, we thought we should post some of the support requests and their answers on our blog so that users experiencing similar situations can find the solutions without waiting for us to end classes or complete our singing sessions in the showers :)

Here’s some questions from our user Daphne about Pages and paragraph formatting:

Hey guys!

The website loads really fast and I’m trying to start an e-book for my poems.

What’s the difference between a page and a chapter? When I write a new page, it doesn’t appear in the e-book, but only chapters do.

Also, is there a way to make it 1.5pt space for the paragraphing? I find that the huge spaces make poems less readable because it is spread out over a considerably large amount of space.

Daphne

Eli’s answer (Do tell us if our answers are too technical because programmers may forget that the rest of us speak English. We’ll send you another version in simplified English :p):

Hi Daphne!

A page is used for extra information, like ‘about the author’ and ‘copyright information.’ Chapters are the ones that appear in the actual table of contents of an ebook.It is possible to have poems display correctly, but that requires some HTML editing. Click the html button on your writing interface. You’ll see a popup appear with the text you’ve entered and the HTML tags attached. You’ll need to use two kinds of tags: the <p> tag (which is the paragraph tag) and the <br> tag (which is the newline tag). I realize this is a hassle, but it’s currently the only way to format poetry on Pandamian.

Note that <p> indicates the start of a paragraph, and </p> indicates the end of a paragraph. So: <p>This is a paragraph!</p> would display as:

This is a paragraph!

Also note that <br> is a standalone tag. Put it anywhere you want a break, e.g:

This is a break<br>Hahaha!

Appears as:

This is a break 
Hahaha!

So, for instance, this poem (on display at http://amathematiciansapology.pandamian.com/8/) is done by:

<p>Here, on the level sand,<br> 
Between the sea and land, <br> 
What shall I build or write<br> 
Against the fall of night?</p>
<p>Tell me of runes to grave<br> 
That hold the bursting wave, <br> 
Or bastions to design, <br> 
For longer date than mine.</p>

Would display as: 

Here, on the level sand,
Between the sea and land, 
What shall I build or write 
Against the fall of night?

Tell me of runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design,
For longer date than mine.

For more information on Pages do check out Eli’s earlier post here. Delivering user support service is so awesome, here’s why:

Ooh that’s awesome, thanks! :) I’ve told my friends about Pandamian and they’re excited about it!

Daphne

That just brought smiles to our faces. Thanks!

Sorry readers, but do bear with me as I churn out another startup-philisophical post. This happens when all the tech guys are building the product and the biz guy is waiting it out, impatiently :)

Our recent launch has changed the way I view starting up. Previously it was:

Find idea > Develop prototype > Get some users to test > Get funding (Yay!) > Incorporate (I’ve Made It!)

*Here, the main purpose of developing an idea is to create a startup. 

But working on the Beta and connecting more with users has brought some new insights:

1. Your users don’t care if you are a startup or a lone ranger programming through the night. They just want something to use that works.
2. Funding is not easy to come by when you cannot show your product’s full potential. Does not help if you are pitching to the wrong type of people :(
3. Being a group of guys huddling behind the computer beats being a registered startup with papers to fill. Gives you more time to get important stuff done like meeting people.
4. Calling yourself a project rather than a startup makes people you are talking to less critical and more open to throwing you ideas (Sometimes, and in certain cases).

So, what is the new train of thought?

Find idea > Talk to lots, and lots, and lots, of people > Build product > Talk to more people > Improve product > Talk some more > Repeat steps in bold until you realize there is a way to generate revenue fromhappy users > Need a legal way to collect payments > Incorporate

*Note: Funding may come along the way to help out.

Take home lesson: Focus on building a product that you and your users love. Don’t think about the money yet, unless you really, really need it (which we all don’t as we are still students). Taking time to find a proper revenue model will help improve the relationship with your users and be beneficial to your product. Patience is the key.

And … the Pandamian beta has launched! Ray Chuan’s not particularly happy with the way we’ve rolled out this release, and so we’re probably going to have to do a post mortem (plus perhaps work out how our deployment would work in the not-too-distant-future).

Personal thoughts on the launch?

1) I’m excited to see that we’re finally seeing real-world usage, which makes working on the software about a gazillion times more exciting than when we were working on it in private.

2) I’m not so excited about the bug reports. As I said on Twitter: “There should be a new law of bugs: ‘the majority of software bugs in a product remain hidden until launch.’”. The good news is that we’ve squashed almost all launch-related bugs within a one-hour timeframe. The bad news is that it’s getting increasingly harder to replicate bugs, now that we’re dealing with so many browser/OS environments.

3) We’ve got this crazy list of features we want to implement, and the current beta is nowhere near even 10% of that. I wish implementing each and every one of those features were as easy as picking them off the list and saying ‘oh, let’s do that next’, but it’s not. And so I think this launch isn’t really a launch, it’s a hack - with which we can tell which of the features on the list we should build next.

At any rate - I’ve not slept last night, and have been programming like mad for the past two days; and so I should probably sign for now. See you soon!

PSST: Joash’s currently attending this event called Founder’s Drinks, and so he’ll probably be online here later writing about the launch, and other things.