May the 4th Be With Us!

On March 7, —it’s hard to believe almost two months have gone by since then—we announced that we would stop our service immediately in April, both in social media and web services. Unfortunately, the heartbreaking news was not an April Fools joke. Nevertheless, two weeks ago or so, we slightly considered softening our shutdown plan. Assuming it might still be useful for some people, we decided that the web will remain accessible until further notice. This is our step in responding to the vast amount of support we received over the past few weeks, during which we have held several impromptu meetings to brainstorm our missions and strategic plans. Approaches to genuinely support this initiative, by all means, have since then been suggested to help us survive. There is nothing else we could say, but thanks.

Speaking of which, our momentary plan is to keep the web accessible, even though temporarily without massive and regular data updates, as an expression of concern for the lack of initiatives like this. As also spoken often enough, we noticed a lack of resources dedicated to the Indonesian literature, especially ones accessible to the international community. Another plan is for us to maintain our social media presence, however, idle it might be.

In general, we are currently seeking alternative ideas to keep rescuing this project. To name a few:

(1)  Raising awareness by media pitching. Gaining press coverage is essentially getting free advertising. It actually has more credibility and in turn, it will most likely convince potential new visitors to check out our services.

(The last pitching we did was on our launching event in January 2015. Around three years later, on April 10th last month, we were delighted to accept the invitation from MNC Trijaya FM to discuss the potential data of Indonesian authors and, more importantly, to share the excitement of IDWRITERS initiative. This was our first media pitch in 2018, which was an enormous opportunity.)

(2) Looking for a potential program to increase traffic to IDWRITERS site, by spinning off our Literary Blog—which is currently being sidled into IDWRITERS main website—to further become an open blog. By opening up the opportunities for blog posting submissions (of works, opinions, or news), we hope/aim to enrich our content related to the literature and/or the book industry, as well as to gain more visitors to the main site idwriters.com.

(3) Reactivate our Support Our Work page, as mentioned herein https://idwriters.com/support/ by (a) preparing several steps to locate and submit a Funding/Grant proposal; (b) also seeking individuals who are willing to be Patrons.

We hope that these plans to restart, although we may be crawling while putting in these efforts, can draw a positive response from the public, thus strengthening us again to continue our initiative, contribute to the world of literature in Indonesia, and participate in being the “voices of Indonesia” to the international community.

Or if you have any other ideas, please let us know!

After all, this is not a shutdown. We are still alive, but definitely dying. Thus, we need you to be here.