Media & Events

Student launches website for aspiring writers

A new social networking site for writers has got everyone talking, from national newspapers to online blogs. Jack Lenox, a third year student studying in the Department of Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London, has recently launched eNovella, a website that allows anyone to upload their creative writing for the online world to read.

eNovella has been an instant hit, registering over one hundred users and almost fifty submitted works within only two weeks. Jack first had the idea for eNovella when he was working on a novel. ‘I thought it would be great if there were a site where you could upload your work and get some feedback’, says Jack. ‘In the same way that Flickr allows you to upload your photos to the web, eNovella allows you to upload your writing’.

Published authors generally have confidence in their writing already, and can use feedback from previous works as a reference. However, the majority of unpublished writers have neither of these advantages. eNovella encourages its many writers to leave feedback on each other’s work and discuss creative writing topics in the forums: prompting The Telegraph to include the site in their ‘Best on the Web’ section, describing it as ‘Facebook for creative writers’. Jack hopes this philosophy will help the website’s users to improve their standard of writing the more they interact using the website. Members can also use the website to browse a selection of books on creative writing.

Getting published is undoubtedly one of the toughest challenges for aspiring writers. One of eNovella’s most exciting features is that it offers the chance for contributors to have their work published in a range of formats – from paperback, to audiobook, to on your iPhone. The most popular stories and poems are voted for by fellow writers on the site, with a chance of getting published coming to the website’s top ten percent of submitted stories.

Following in the footstep of entrepreneur Richard Branson, Jack first demonstrated his aptitude for turning enterprising ideas into reality when he launched The Founder newspaper in December 2006. This independent student newspaper prides itself on having a writing team comprised entirely of students from Royal Holloway, and has so far published 35 issues – amassing an impressive 175,000 print copies.

The future looks promising for eNovella. It currently sits second on KillerStartUps’ list of top ten new websites – voted for by the online community based on what is thought most likely to be the internet’s ‘next big thing’. Jack is confident about eNovella’s future, commenting, ‘It has got lots of potential for expansion. In the long-term I′m aiming for it to become the biggest website in the UK for undiscovered writers, by spotlighting and publishing their works. The website offers two key things that many aspiring writers seek – feedback and exposure’.

For more information, please visit: http://enovella.co.uk