The online story-development tool, based in Germany, was founded in 2015 and enables early-stage collaboration between authors and editors
While moderating a panel on new publishing models at Publishers Forum in Germany last week, we found a singular speaker onstage with us: Germany’s Beemgee, a tool for authors. Remarkably, Beemgee is not designed to publish and sell your book, but simply to make your book better.
The outlining and plotting tool makes its money from subscriptions, with authors paying €59 (US$71) annually for its premium offering. A more basic edition is available for free. When we asked Beemgee founder Robert Becker how Beemgee compares to Scrivener, he said the key difference is that Beemgee functions online, in the cloud, so that author and editor (or co-author) can work together on a text (as they can with Reedsy’s editing tools or Google Docs). Furthermore, it’s not specifically for writing your book; it’s more a form of mentoring, a prompting system.
Publishers in the audience seemed to like the idea that their editors might be able to work with their authors through a story-development interface. It’s something more “playful,” as Becker puts it, than other editing software. Becker tested it with the major German house Carlsen, and he found that two authors there had extremely good results on book development in collaboration with the house. Publishers may look at this as a bulk buy to offer their authors.
You can find more information about it in English and German Beemgee’s bilingual site; you can drop in an imaginary title of a work in progress and let the system give you a quick tour of what it does. If you’d rather watch a video, there’s one here.
Bottom line: Beemgee was founded in 2015, and yet it’s flown below the radar while in development. Becker describes it as a system that puts everything you normally do on a wall full of Post-its into a digital format, then stimulates experimentation and creative shifts in thinking. On the website, you can find a “roadmap” of features that makes it clear the site’s full suite of functions isn’t yet in place. Elements that deal with story arcs, dramatic irony, and scene types are in the works, while a “character developer” and horizontal timeline are among 21 assets already live.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
