Created by Jacob Lewis and Dana Goodyear, who both worked at The New Yorker, the site officially launched on December 6, 2010.
[3] Inspired by the popularity of the Japanese cell phone novel, Dana Goodyear, poet and journalist, and Jacob Lewis, former managing editor of The New Yorker, created Figment as a platform on which young adults can share their writing and interact with other writers.
Users can "publish" and access short stories, poetry, lyrics, essays, and novels either on their computers or with their mobile phones.
[9] Susan Katz, the HarperCollins Children's Book president, said of the move: “We approached Figment because we’ve admired what they are doing in the digital space.
Together we can broaden our marketing reach for our authors and their stories by tapping into this highly engaged group.” [10] Figment occasionally offered writing contests to help writers hone their skills.
Contests have included the participation of Paulo Coelho, Darren Shan, Gayle Forman, Jackson Pearce, Sherry Shahan, Lauren Oliver, Lisi Harrison, Billy Collins, Nicholas Sparks, Sara Shepard, Drusilla Campbell and many others.
Users in high school or college were challenged to write a 600-character story about their coming-of-age moment and to submit to it the Figment page at Zinch.com for a chance to win a $500 scholarship.
The judge of the contest is author Jonathan Safran Foer, writer of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
Two additional stories appeared on the Defy the Dark website, "Bogwater" by Grrrillaful and "After Illume" by Emily Skrutskie.
[17] Figment was chosen as a winning start-up company at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference 2011[18] and was also selected as a 15th Annual Webby Awards Official Honoree in the "Youth" category.