In the era of lockdown, how do you bring a harmony of peace into your life? All of us who are marinating in boredom and isolation, what do we do with our free time that provides a passage to the outside world in the reality of social distancing?
We write.
Writing has become the outlet that feeds our soul and helps us stave off reality from intruding. It’s an escape and a means for our voices to be heard. To write well and to share our writing with the world, we need a good app, something different from the same boring and over-trodden path down the gullet of social media like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
In comes Jiya®.
Don’t get us wrong, social media apps are good and useful, but you will agree that when we sit down to write, there is a need for space reserved just for the freedom of expression, for the support of fellow writers and enough breathing room to pour our thoughts out. Jiya does that and more in spades.
Writing has ballooned up as a major outlet for our creative juices during the pandemic. We write not only to express our thoughts and feelings, but also to connect with other people. Jiya provides a platform not only to launch amateur and emerging writers to showcase their talent but also for people to come together in solidarity and appreciation of the written word. Writers need a safe space where expressing themselves and reading good, nay, great writing is part of the norm, be it poetry, short fiction or articles, letters, conversations, etc.
You may ask ‘Why Jiya?’ That is a good question.
The reason JIYA® stands out from its peers is because of the simple and profound reason it was created. The publishing market has been disrupted over the years with the sole focus on selling books. Most of the publishers now look for the number of followers on Facebook and Instagram of a writer rather than look for new and untested talent. Due to the proliferation of social media marketing, the rules are more skewed than ever with the spotlight on the number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ to ensure that more books are sold. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but when there is no other goal than selling books, good literature takes a backseat to profit. Editors are leery of taking in new authors because of the huge expense involved in traditional publishing, and therefore only tried and tested authors are given the chance to showcase their work. Aside from the expense, the entire timeline of getting a book published is slow enough to make a new up-and-coming author start climbing up the walls.
To solve this problem, over the last few years some companies have launched websites and/or mobile apps for publishing online or other software to self-publish like on Amazon. But the problem persists in the uni-directionality of these apps. Most of them support only one or two type of content or there is a limitation to the number of characters you can publish at a given time. Not all of us want to write stories in 1200-characters or microblogs in 280 characters. Most of the apps and websites are also stunted in their vision as they do not support or encourage all genres of writing, some support only short fiction, others encourage articles, some only poems, or a limited combination thereof.
JIYA® was designed and developed with the vision of rectifying this lack of freedom in putting thoughts onto the metaphorical paper, so to speak. Therefore, the reasons to download this app are manifold. Jiya provides writers with the autonomy to indulge in all kinds of content from stories to haikus to quotes to op-eds, sky is literally the limit. Jiya, for now, is only available as an Android application and is the newest and best addition to the social Literature Network. As it portrays the social network for literature, the app can be used to self-publish, for reading and sharing on social media and discovering other writers. To make things easier to navigate and build a community for the writers by the writers, the content has been categorized into six broad groups such as Poejia for poems, Jiyatale for stories and micro-tales, Articles of any kind, Boffola for one-liners and quotes, 2U which is for writing letters to anyone or anything, and Jiyatalk which is for conversational pieces and dialogues.The posts can be written and read in English, Hindi and Bengali although work is being done to expand it to other languages of the world as well.
These groups are then sub-categorized into different genres like Social, Life, Adventure, Emotions, so on and so forth. The different categories are easy to organize which makes it a lark to browse. As any writer well knows, the market is saturated with writing apps. Before downloading, a writer needs to make sure that all their needs are met, which makes Jiya a winner in the special features department.
The app boasts of numerous special features like giving us the choice to save our unfinished writing in drafts so that we can come back, right where we left off, to edit or proofread or finish off writing; we can save posts that we love (and believe me there will be many of those) in bookmarks to read later with time to enjoy and a steaming cup of coffee; the need to read and support other writers is satiated by the option to follow and subscribe to other feeds so that their work is highlighted in respective timelines in real time; we can also encourage other writers and they can return the favour by rating and commenting on their posts and sharing them along with our own work on other social media networks; the post design feature lets us turn our ordinary posts into works of art with beautiful background templates, a range of stunning font customizations along with the capacity to make it arresting with different text colours and sizes plus alignment options for each separate line, unlike other popular writing apps that only allow bulk customizations; characterlimit is a thing of the past with the Jiya app unlike others populating the market, there is literally enough space to write our heart out or die trying — from poetry, short stories, articles — anything is possible.
The Jiya app is also full of other features like Facebook/Google Login for ease of use and a powerful rich-text editor that lets writers express their true selves.
Choosing an app that suits our needs is a cause for stress and worry. How do you choose a writing app that allows you to engage and build our own writing tribe when there are so many options to choose from? Any great app should have more value and excellence than others to put it head and shoulders above the rest. For that to happen an app needs to be different, easy to use, aesthetically pleasing and most important of all, used by people with shared interests. Jiya fulfils all of these conditions because in the world of Jiya, nothing else matters.
The name ‘Jiya’ literally means Heart, Spirit or Soul. We need all three when we write. We need to be able to breathe, love and create our own luck, doubly so if we have chosen writing as more than a hobby, when it runs in our blood as our purpose.
Download JIYA app today from Play Store and start expressing your creativity in this beautiful canvas of expression.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hoplite.jiya
