4 Replies to “Joseph Willrich Lutalo: I*POW: Building a Transnational Creative Publishing Platform from the Margins”
Thank you for this, Joseph, and congratulations on what I*POW has built. Roughly thirty works in circulation across Uganda, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and India since December 2024, with no institutional or financial backing, is a genuinely remarkable output, and I appreciated your frankness about the operational strain behind it rather than presenting only the successes.
My question is about Telegram. Choosing a messaging platform as the home of the portfolio, rather than a website or a conventional press, strikes me as a substantive infrastructural decision and not merely a convenient one. It presumably shapes how work circulates, how members find each other, and how readers arrive. I’d be curious what you’ve found it affords that a more conventional platform wouldn’t, and what it costs you. In particular: how do you think about the permanence and discoverability of the thirty works? A press assumes deposit, cataloguing, and an archive that outlives the publisher. What is I*POW’s equivalent?
Thanks Prof. Holly for taking the time to engage with our presentation. Good points made. We appreciate.
Yes, the matter you raise concerning the choice of the platform was a critical aspect of our original establishment. The reasons for picking Telegram as a primary host were several, among which, the fact that it was already a worthwhile trustworthy option for prototyping a globally accessible repository of text, media and file artefacts without having to invest in a stand-alone traditional web hosted solution was a paramount justification. I originally had first attempted the traditional route with an earlier project mostly focusing on African writers only. That was circa 2010s and that project was based on a content management system I had designed and implemented myself (using Python/Django) to feature most of what I wanted a portfolio platform with inbuilt book editing and Electronic publication facilities (HTML to PDF and HTML to Epub) in-built. It was implemented to help aspiring writers cover all aspects of the writing and publishing workflow from a single website. However, first, I soon (about two years into the project) met with difficulties sustaining it.. the hosting charges grew as content increased, but also I had to keep the domain-name active, SSL certificates, etc. I then eventually had to retire that NuScribes.com Project.
The lessons from that project are what compelled me to trust a solution such as Telegram. It’s free for starters even though they do have premium features that come at a cost. It’s also great for having centralised administration of both membership and content as well as moderation of community interactions. Lots of useful features for a content-oriented but also community and interaction-oriented project unlike most other current social platforms.
However, Telegram does have its limitations and especially some that might hinder our steady growth as a literature publisher and/or portfolio. Among these.. especially in the earlier times, was discoverability. We had to manually share links (via other social platforms) for most of the published works to gain visibility. However, these days seems like search engines like Google do index public channels and content on Telegram. But still, it’s not clear why some channels such as I*POW’s can’t yet be accessed directly via a search engine.
The other issues are about content visibility for people not willing to use or access content via the official Telegram app given it started out as just a mobile-based platform. However, as we speak, it’s accessible via desktop and web as well (for non-contributors too). So, very likely, in the future, it could become as competitive a content hosting platform as many established ones out there are (Medium, Amazon, WordPress, etc).
As for long-term curating of content beyond publisher.. I definitely must repeat what we actually already stressed in the I*POW paper behind our presentation; we do have plans to not only curate our member’s works in physical form such as via printed compilations in times to come, but likewise do+intend to leverage other globally recognized publishing platforms to likewise host and grow long-term visibility of works from our authors. Preprint servers, academic journals and with time, also the Internet Archive among others. Good enough, works published via I*POW aren’t necessity tied to the publisher’s hosting platform given most are already in portable form as PDFs right from the onset (it’s our official primary publication format), and so that, both individual publications but also the entire collection of our works can readily be taken elsewhere.. anywhere PDFs can be hosted in times to come, without impacting their original quality or worth.
Hopefully that addresses most of your concerns. Thanks otherwise for the wonderful feedback. Also, we definitely welcome suggestions and pointers towards better means to grow this project as well as to collaborate with other/bigger/better publishing entities.
I*POW sounds like a really great platform, Joseph. Thanks for sharing it with us in this presentation. I wanted to ask about the range of writing you’d hope to include in the organization. I see that you include novels, novellas, poetry, and short stories. But I wonder if technical and professional/marketing writing would also be suitable for I*POW? I guess my broader question has to do with looking to the future of I*POW. Where do you hope it goes from here? What do you see as its end goal?
Yup, so, concerning the scope of work we wish to cover as I*POW, I doubt we actually wish to constrain ourselves to just one or a few particular literature genres right now. In fact, the fact that our community is open to interested writers from any background and that we mostly intend to keep the portfolios engaging and competitive for audiences of arbitrary kind means yes, we shall continue to support both creative/artistic and technical/academic works. The most important thing is that the works we publish or curate in our portfolio are originally the IP of their respective authors and that for especially young or amateur writers, that it’s among their best submissions possible at the time of submission to the editorial team.
That said, we of course don’t see ourselves wanting to compete with traditional or mainstream publication outlets especially not with those that focus on just academic literature (the Taylor and Francis, MacMillans, etc.) especially because our model isn’t yet able to carry the burden of ensuring global distribution of works in physical form, we don’t yet pay for nor guarantee registration of member contributions in standard catalogs such as Congress (US), British Library, etc. And don’t yet provide ISBNs for our publications unless if the author procures one for themselves. Also, many of our publications still have no visibility in standard literature indexes such as those tracked by Google Scholar, SciHub, etc. Most of these issues are currently because of the limitations we face as a still noncommercial E&P entity as well as the kind of content hosting platform we currently leverage as the default (Telegram). But maybe things shall get better in the future.
Thank you for this, Joseph, and congratulations on what I*POW has built. Roughly thirty works in circulation across Uganda, Zimbabwe, Pakistan and India since December 2024, with no institutional or financial backing, is a genuinely remarkable output, and I appreciated your frankness about the operational strain behind it rather than presenting only the successes.
My question is about Telegram. Choosing a messaging platform as the home of the portfolio, rather than a website or a conventional press, strikes me as a substantive infrastructural decision and not merely a convenient one. It presumably shapes how work circulates, how members find each other, and how readers arrive. I’d be curious what you’ve found it affords that a more conventional platform wouldn’t, and what it costs you. In particular: how do you think about the permanence and discoverability of the thirty works? A press assumes deposit, cataloguing, and an archive that outlives the publisher. What is I*POW’s equivalent?
Thanks Prof. Holly for taking the time to engage with our presentation. Good points made. We appreciate.
Yes, the matter you raise concerning the choice of the platform was a critical aspect of our original establishment. The reasons for picking Telegram as a primary host were several, among which, the fact that it was already a worthwhile trustworthy option for prototyping a globally accessible repository of text, media and file artefacts without having to invest in a stand-alone traditional web hosted solution was a paramount justification. I originally had first attempted the traditional route with an earlier project mostly focusing on African writers only. That was circa 2010s and that project was based on a content management system I had designed and implemented myself (using Python/Django) to feature most of what I wanted a portfolio platform with inbuilt book editing and Electronic publication facilities (HTML to PDF and HTML to Epub) in-built. It was implemented to help aspiring writers cover all aspects of the writing and publishing workflow from a single website. However, first, I soon (about two years into the project) met with difficulties sustaining it.. the hosting charges grew as content increased, but also I had to keep the domain-name active, SSL certificates, etc. I then eventually had to retire that NuScribes.com Project.
The lessons from that project are what compelled me to trust a solution such as Telegram. It’s free for starters even though they do have premium features that come at a cost. It’s also great for having centralised administration of both membership and content as well as moderation of community interactions. Lots of useful features for a content-oriented but also community and interaction-oriented project unlike most other current social platforms.
However, Telegram does have its limitations and especially some that might hinder our steady growth as a literature publisher and/or portfolio. Among these.. especially in the earlier times, was discoverability. We had to manually share links (via other social platforms) for most of the published works to gain visibility. However, these days seems like search engines like Google do index public channels and content on Telegram. But still, it’s not clear why some channels such as I*POW’s can’t yet be accessed directly via a search engine.
The other issues are about content visibility for people not willing to use or access content via the official Telegram app given it started out as just a mobile-based platform. However, as we speak, it’s accessible via desktop and web as well (for non-contributors too). So, very likely, in the future, it could become as competitive a content hosting platform as many established ones out there are (Medium, Amazon, WordPress, etc).
As for long-term curating of content beyond publisher.. I definitely must repeat what we actually already stressed in the I*POW paper behind our presentation; we do have plans to not only curate our member’s works in physical form such as via printed compilations in times to come, but likewise do+intend to leverage other globally recognized publishing platforms to likewise host and grow long-term visibility of works from our authors. Preprint servers, academic journals and with time, also the Internet Archive among others. Good enough, works published via I*POW aren’t necessity tied to the publisher’s hosting platform given most are already in portable form as PDFs right from the onset (it’s our official primary publication format), and so that, both individual publications but also the entire collection of our works can readily be taken elsewhere.. anywhere PDFs can be hosted in times to come, without impacting their original quality or worth.
Hopefully that addresses most of your concerns. Thanks otherwise for the wonderful feedback. Also, we definitely welcome suggestions and pointers towards better means to grow this project as well as to collaborate with other/bigger/better publishing entities.
Cheers!
J’Willrich
I*POW Editor-in-Chief.
I*POW sounds like a really great platform, Joseph. Thanks for sharing it with us in this presentation. I wanted to ask about the range of writing you’d hope to include in the organization. I see that you include novels, novellas, poetry, and short stories. But I wonder if technical and professional/marketing writing would also be suitable for I*POW? I guess my broader question has to do with looking to the future of I*POW. Where do you hope it goes from here? What do you see as its end goal?
Thanks Prof. Jordan for checking us out!
Yup, so, concerning the scope of work we wish to cover as I*POW, I doubt we actually wish to constrain ourselves to just one or a few particular literature genres right now. In fact, the fact that our community is open to interested writers from any background and that we mostly intend to keep the portfolios engaging and competitive for audiences of arbitrary kind means yes, we shall continue to support both creative/artistic and technical/academic works. The most important thing is that the works we publish or curate in our portfolio are originally the IP of their respective authors and that for especially young or amateur writers, that it’s among their best submissions possible at the time of submission to the editorial team.
That said, we of course don’t see ourselves wanting to compete with traditional or mainstream publication outlets especially not with those that focus on just academic literature (the Taylor and Francis, MacMillans, etc.) especially because our model isn’t yet able to carry the burden of ensuring global distribution of works in physical form, we don’t yet pay for nor guarantee registration of member contributions in standard catalogs such as Congress (US), British Library, etc. And don’t yet provide ISBNs for our publications unless if the author procures one for themselves. Also, many of our publications still have no visibility in standard literature indexes such as those tracked by Google Scholar, SciHub, etc. Most of these issues are currently because of the limitations we face as a still noncommercial E&P entity as well as the kind of content hosting platform we currently leverage as the default (Telegram). But maybe things shall get better in the future.
Hopefully that clears up your concerns. SKNAHT!
Fut. Prof. J’Willrich
I*POW Editor-in-Chief