Novel Effect: The New Paradigm of Reading Dynamics

How does your solution work for an educator?

First, an educator downloads our app available on iOS devices. After downloading, they choose a title from our app library—they will need to have a printed or ebook copy of that title in their classroom. In the app, they select “Read Book”, and once the app notes it is “Listening” they start to read the print book aloud. The app will follow along with the educator’s voice adding music, sound effects and character voices along the way.

As I mentioned before, the app is very easy to use with a search feature and curated bookshelves that are seasonally appropriate. Further, we work with major publishers to ensure we have a good content mix and constantly grow our categories—we recently added poetry and are looking at early readers next.

Could you provide us with a case study where you have helped a client in attaining their desired outcomes?

We met poet Janet Wong, at an educator conference and she mentioned how she was a tireless advocate for inspiring the next generation of writers to write poetry. Janet speaks at several conferences and events annually helping teachers and librarians find ways to teach poetry in their curricula. She also created The Poetry Friday Anthology series to aid in that mission. We were inspired by her mission and worked together to create a new content category on the app that Janet curated. We now have over a dozen poems in the app and continue to add new ones regularly. Janet and the other poets included in the app help promote Novel Effect on social media and during their events. And we have found our audience is thrilled to have this new content available for the classroom.

What does the future hold for Novel Effect?

We are a company with many ideas and potential directions that we can go. In the immediate, we are finalizing an Android version of the app, which will launch soon. And we are also looking to open up the in-house studio tool that we use to create soundscapes to a select group of educators this year. Our hope is that we can enable students and educators to use the technology to add effects to their own stories, becoming a great tool for STEAM learning in the classroom that integrates really well into core curriculum.

Everywhere we go, we get requests for new ways to use our technology—from helping to teach other languages to family game night! We love hearing this feedback and are focused on developing partnerships that will expand Novel Effect into a ‘global storytelling experience brand.’