Announcing Shaxpir 2.0
Benji Smith
Feb 21, 2016
I’m delighted to announce that the Shaxpir BETA is complete, and we’re officially launching Shaxpir 2.0 today! You can download an installer for Macintosh or Windows by clicking here:
Start a 30-DAY FREE TRIAL today, with no credit card required.
We’re also offering a limited-time promotion to celebrate the launch. Just enter coupon code LAUNCH-PARTY before the end of your trial, to get 50% OFF the normal subscription price ($7.99 per month) for the next SIX MONTHS. This deal expires on the last day of February, so get it while it lasts.
Anyhow, the beta was a huge success for us.
Our 182 beta testers logged in more than 1,750 times, spending over 1,900 hours writing, and composing more than 800,000 words. They worked on 251 different manuscripts, writing 921 chapters of prose, and filling their notebooks with more than 1,400 notes about the characters, concepts, places, and themes in their stories.
But most importantly, those beta users gave us incredibly valuable feedback about their writing process, which helped us design a better product. So, besides staying in touch with our beta team, we’ve also been busy on the design and engineering side, making product improvements with four overarching themes:
Unified Content Model: A significant refinement of our assumptions about the writing process, with a customizable new architecture that gives authors more flexibility in organizing their manuscripts and notebooks. (click here to read more)
HTML Export: Publish your book in the Kindle or iBook stores, or on your own blog, by exporting your assembled manuscript with this open, portable, industry-standard file format. These files can be easily imported into Microsoft Word or Google Docs, for maximum compatibility. (click here to read more)
Reliability and Security: We fixed dozens of bugs, both large and small, in the user interface, text editor component, layout engine, cloud synchronization system, and version-tracking. We made improvements to our auto-update system, implemented cryptographic security (code-signing) on our installer packages, upgraded our server-side technologies, and improved fault-tolerance.
Productization: Gotta pay the bills somehow, right? We built a subscription system with plans and pricing, credit card billing, transactional messaging, cancellations and reinstatements, coupon codes, and lots of other stuff to make the business side of things go go go.
I’m extremely proud of this product, and it gives me great joy to share it with you today. My deepest desire is that Shaxpir will be the platform that gives countless authors an exquisite new workspace for brainstorming, story engineering, world-building, prose craftsmanship, and collaboration.
Thanks to everyone who has been a part of this journey so far, and a warm welcome to those of you just joining us now. Let’s build something incredible together.