A Penmob Walk-Through — With Screenshots!

We’re super excited for you all to experience editing on Penmob! We know that trying a new platform can be a little overwhelming at first, so we’ve pulled together this walk-through to give you an idea what it’s like to have a team of editors getting down to business on your writing. Check out the screenshots below and don’t hesitate to email us if you have any questions.

The Basics

• Your essay appears on the left. On the right, there’s some information about your piece including a description, relevant hashtags, budget, the writer’s profile, and how long their draft is open for edits. You can click the “Hide details” button to conceal this.
• The other button, “Discuss,” will take you to a list of all the comments made on your piece. We’ll talk about that page in a bit.
• The portions of your piece that have been edited will be highlighted in blue.

• When you click on the highlighted portion, the edit will appear in the right sidebar.
• There, you’ll see who left the edit and how long ago it was written (I’m “You” in that picture).
• Edits can be scored. This is an important piece of feedback that writers give to the Penmob editors. Each edit can be scored with quick fix, light edit, or deep edit. Editors who leave deeper, more substantial edits will get a bigger cut of the writer’s pre-paid budget.
• Below my comment, you can see a response made to my comment by Penmob’s founder Alex.
• Note that there’s also an option to flag a comment if it’s inappropriate.
• There are also arrows pointing left and right in the sidebar. These allow you to quickly cycle through all of the edits on your piece.

• Alex and I had a bit of conversation about my original comment. The ability for editors to engage with each other is such a great Penmob feature. It can really help you decide how much weight to give to a comment and gain additional perspective. It also allows editors to learn from each other.

• There’s space at the end of the piece for editors to add endnotes with their overall feedback.

• This is the discussion page I mentioned earlier. It gives you the option to look at all of the comments made on your piece on one page. This is another feature that will make your life so much easier during the revision process. No more shuffling through all of the pages of your piece, trying to read notes scribbled in the margins.

Pretty simple right? Yeah, we think so too. Penmob is launching just in time to get your submissions together for all those retreat applications, contests and literary journal deadlines. Sign up to a part of the first wave of writers to have their worked edited on Penmob.