CHENNAI: A dentist by profession, Dr S Pavitra Priyadarshoni discontinued her practice to pursue her dream of launching a sading application. “The time I was on a break after the birth of my child, I thought of giving the story reading a virtual touch. However, before I launched Potboiler android application, I started my journey through blog,” shares Pavitra.
Primarily two specific nature of the present day generation inspired her — people love sharing instances of their personal life through social networking sites and are mostly hooked to watching web series in the episodic format. “So, I thought why not blend these two features and engage people in reading stories? This way people will get to share their own stories through a third person point of view and as well as enjoy the episodic stories,”she quips.
Sharing details of her blogs, she says, “The first story I wrote had around 30-35 chapters while the next story was divided into 15 episodes. After I started promoting it through Facebook and WhatsApp people not only visited my blog but also liked and appreciated my concept. This motivated me to start the Potboiler as I thought it would be an ideal way to share the stories,” she smiles.
Initially, she used to write all the stories but now she has a team of 10 writers. The popularity of her app among readers also made her lessen the release time. At present, the app has around 24 stories divided in three categories — kids, adults and short stories. The kids section has six stories and the adult section has 10 stories where they are divided into three to 10 episodes and 10 to 15 episodes respectively. While remaining are short stories.
“The stories for the kid's section are written based on two genres —fantasy and moral values. Among the six stories that we have so far, four are based on moral values and two are on fantasy. In the adult's category, we don't follow any particular genre; you will find stories based on crime, suspense, romantic thriller, family drama and so on,” she explains. Only three months old, her android app has already garnered attention beyond her expectation. “When I opened Potboiler, I wasn't too sure about the result... And now it has more than 970 downloads,” she grins.
At present potboiler is for free but soon she plans to incorporate few revenue models to the venture. “Apart from looking for sponsors, I am thinking of introducing a pay system for instant access — people will have to pay to read the chapter on the day of its release. Along with this, I am also planning to start an art and story writing competition to be held across the various schools and colleges of the city through my app. This will have a two-fold effect — not only will it generate revenue but it will also promote story reading and writing habit among children and teenagers,” she says.
For the story writing competition, students can do the following: after reading a particular story on the app, you can send her team a write-up about the next three episodes and the best writing will get published in the app. Coming to the art competition — students between ages five and 15 years can participate where they will sketch their favourite character or scene, take a photo and email it to her. Her future plan includes roping celebrity writers for Potboiler and making it an interactive platform through the readers' corner section.