Pen to Paper Blogs

May 5, 2022

While we’re hanging up our PenToPaper hats as the Digital Innovations Capstone course comes to a close, we’re proud of the product we created in an effort to make authors and wannabe writers accountable with their writing progress and tracking.

We started this semester struggling to string together 500 words about what our initial product was. After changing direction and rethinking what it was we really wanted to create, we shifted gears from a full-service marketing book firm to an online tracking journal for seasoned authors and wannabe writers. Our product, PenToPaper, allows writers to track their writing habits like wordage from a writing session, best and worst writing environments for that specific user and even rating distractions during a user’s writing session. But our product doesn’t stop there.

Our PenToPaper logo!

While the PenToPaper journal is the highlight of our work, we also created an individualized newsletter that each PenToPaper consumer receives monthly, summarizing the amount of minutes they logged writing, how many words were written per minute on average, how many times a user wrote and which time of day a user was most productive in their writing. The PenToPaper individualized newsletter also highlights what the PenToPaper community is reading because we believe that you read how you write, meaning your writing is only as good as how much you’re reading. We’re huge proponents of learning and that everyone is a student, so we love the idea of having a “What We’re Reading” section within our newsletter. The newsletter also highlights an interview with a PenToPaper author, showcasing a Q&A for

other PenToPaper users. Finally, the PenToPaper website acts as a marketing tool to show potential consumers and users what PenToPaper is and how beneficial it can be within the writing world.

We also learned a lot about how to make our product the best it can be for our writing audience. From focus groups to feedback forms, finding the right mix of balancing the amount of time it takes to track your writing to the amount of feedback and insight the writer receives was one of the biggest challenges of our project. Through the help of our focus group and a month and a half of the trial run through Google Forms, we’ve added several features that we believe makes the process a lot smoother as well as more insightful for our authors.

The most important feature we added is the opportunity to fill out individualized tracking forms — we asked writers to fill out an initial form at the start of their process detailing the writing projects they were working on, their ideal goal ends and other writer-specific information like the spots they frequent the most to write. We then generated a personal writing tracking progress form for each writer, which takes less time to fill out and is more specific to each writers’ goals. For instance, instead of having to type out a specific location that a writer writes at frequently, that writer could just select it from the list of common places where they tend to write at. One thing we quickly realized after starting our project was that each writer was extremely unique in their process. While that seems intuitive, seeing the data of when each author was most productive and most satisfied with their writing varied so widely, making us realize that the individualized route was the way to go.

One of our dashboards for a writer showing some of the data about this user’s writing

From the feedback we received, we also learned that there’s a lot more potential for our product. In our focus group, the authors’ overwhelming consensus was that integration into a writing application (Microsoft Word or Google Docs, for example) would make them more likely to use PenToPaper. The added benefits would include not having to track word count or time at the end of a writing session, as well as being able to track other data points that we currently don’t have the capability to track given user input, like the amount of deleted words and the amount of time spent actually writing versus not writing during the session.

The PenToPaper team poses for a photo with their Hook ‘Em’s up

Ideally, the next step of the product would include both an app version as well as integration into a writing application. But even if our product never makes it there, we’ve learned a lot during the process, not only about putting pen to paper but also about each other and our own writing goals and dreams. 

The four of us started this process hoping to help others become the best writer they can be. Along the way, we’ve become better for it too.

March 28, 2022

We thought AI marketing was the way to go, turns out we were wrong. Every good idea usually hits a few roadblocks on the way to success, and that’s exactly what happened to our group.

We’re a team of journalism students and wannabe authors, and that hasn’t changed. Since our first blog post, we’ve decided to pivot paths and ideas, turning a corner to a different direction, the direction of journal writing.

We believed that an AI marketing book firm would help authors better and more successfully self-publish and market their up-and-coming books. Our AI marketing firm, The Shelf, was intended to be a firm that helped wannabe authors, first-time authors and long-time veteran authors market and produce their book from beginning to end through SEO (search engine optimization), AI marketing and personable editing and consulting.

We mentioned we’re wannabe authors, so let’s pivot back to that for a second. All four of us love writing. We’re captivated by words and how we can string words together to both create and tell stories. Nathan and Kendall still desire to write novels in the young adult fiction genre, Elexa still wants to write a stellar autobiography, and Kaitlyn still wishes to one day adequately write about her faith.

What we’ve created is a tool that we believe would help us in the process of writing our dream books. Like we said in our last blog post, stringing together words is hard, stringing together a whole book is even harder. Our new product would help wannabe authors like us not be too daunted from the book writing process, keeping us accountable and disciplined in our writing goals.

“Pen to Paper” aims to help writers along the writing process. Each time a writer writes using Pen to Paper, they answer questions about their writing session, such as how many words they wrote this session, how long they wrote, where they wrote, etc. 

We created Pen to Paper as a way to reflect, journal and reminisce on our writing progress. The ultimate goal of Pen to Paper is that it would help wannabe authors like Kendall, Nathan, Elexa and Kaitlyn, up-and-coming authors and established authors all track their writing progress.

After a week’s worth of writing sessions have accumulated and so have the words on an author’s page, we’ll send the writer a feedback report, which you view below.

Pen to Paper’s dashboard showcases an author’s month-long progress and writing habits, delivering the information and data in a report-like fashion. Here, our user, Lily, recorded that she wrote 16 times over one month, finding herself to have a 75 percent productivity rating each writing session.

We created a sample feedback report to show what this report would look like over a month-long period. Hopefully, Lily would be able to use this report and realize that she writes best at certain times (in the afternoon or late at night) and in certain locations (at home or in the library).

Currently, we’re working on adding more features to the way our tracking works. One Pen to Paper addition we added just this week prompts the author for their writing goals through another series of questions. 

Then, our weekly reports will tell authors how much progress they’ve made on their goal, how long we estimate it would take for them to reach their goal based on current progress and which types of sessions have been most productive toward reaching certain goals.

Eventually, we hope to turn our product into a website and app where both entering information and seeing your progress is easy and simple. The end goal is finding the right balance between giving the writer useful information they can use to improve their writing process and not making using our product a hassle or a bother. 

We believe writing should be an easy and stress-free space, and our product aims to accomplish that.

We want to help people who use our product become the best writer they can be by putting their pen to paper as productively and efficiently as possible. Let’s make writing fun, let’s put pen to paper.

February 18, 2022

Stringing together 500 words is hard.

Stringing together a whole book is even harder. And sometimes, getting a book on shelves while also being seen is even harder, harder.

Enter AI marketing. Our team is composed of four students: Nathan, Kendall, Elexa and Kaitlyn. We all want to write books one day and we all desire to one day be labeled as authors. Nathan and Kendall want to write books in the young adult fiction genre, Elexa wants to write a stellar autobiography and Kaitlyn wants to put adequate words together about her faith. But there’s one thing that stands between our dreams of writing a book and –– fingers crossed –– profiting off of it, and that one thing is marketing.

We know and believe that the self-publishing industry, and even the traditional book publishing industry for that matter, is a hard one to break into. It seems nearly impossible to write a book and bring that product to profitable fruition, and when it is possible, the odds of success seem like nearly one in a million. We’re here to make every book publishing dream come true, and successfully at that.

AI copywriting and editing is already upon us, but AI marketing is not. What we’re bringing to the table is a marketing and consulting service that helps indie book publishers, self publishers and even the pesky Big Four 

(Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group and Harper Collins) can use to make the book publishing process easier and even more profitable than it already is.

Our AI marketing tool would allow publishers of all kinds to input a finished manuscript, customizing marketing plans and strategies that cater to each intended genre, age group, audience and country of the proposed novel. After our AI marketing strategy is assigned, authors would be designated a book editing and marketing consultant that would help bring their book to market and do so successfully.