Co-publish with us on Instagram

Every few weeks, we release stories designed to get co-published as collaborator posts on Instagram. Each story is thoughtfully created, researched, and produced, giving original content designed specifically for Instagram. When you co-publish these stories as a collaborator with us on Instagram, these original stories appear on your profile while connecting your channel to new circles by pooling audiences. As a collaborator, you can also contribute appropriate images or videos of your business or personal brand to the story. It's a great way to access original stories that contribute lifestyle and wider idea-based narratives into your feed.

FAQs

How does this work?

Collaborator posts on Instagram allow adding up to four people to co-publish a story together. A story published this way appears on the Instagram feed of every collaborator. When you browse our story releases, if there’s a story you’d like to co-publish with us on Instagram as a collaborator, just email us at hello@publicworks.store or WhatsApp +94 777 647 096. We’ll get in touch with the details to make it happen.

What is a sole collaborator and a group collaborator?

A group collaborator is when you collaborate with a group of up to four more people who will be added as collaborators to the same story. This is great because the story you purchased to co-publish with everyone else will appear in all their feeds, introducing your account to new circles. A sole collaborator is when you pay extra and become the only collaborator to co-publish the story; this gives you room to supplement the story with more images/videos from your personal brand or business and have a higher degree of customizability.

Can collaborators add to the story?

Collaborators can submit photos, videos, and hashtags that align with their business or personal brand to supplement the story. Of course, the images or videos you submit must bear relevance to the story. If you submit images or videos to supplement a story this way, appropriate credits will be added to the caption, tagging your handle.

Why collaborate for stories?

We started offering the option to purchase our original stories as collaborator posts so that more people can share great content at an affordable rate. It also allows everyone to pool community resources and engage with wider circles.

What kind of images or videos can collaborators submit?

Relevant, within Instagram guidelines (under 60-second videos in MP4 format), and with clear usage rights for the content.

What can’t collaborators control?

Who the other collaborators are (unless you’ve snagged the sole collaborator spot😌), what videos or images other collaborators submit, the order and exact cropping of images and videos, and how many out of the images or videos you submitted will be chosen for the post if you submit more than one.

Got more questions? Just ask us. Email us at hello@commercialstories.com or WhatsApp +94 777 647 096. Currently, Instagram only allows adding 4 collaborators per story; we follow a first come, first served basis.

Kuanna

Kuanna noticed the sixth body for the week being taken to the jungle in a funeral parade. A group of nine or ten followed the four who were carrying the corpse wrapped in cloth, singing their funeral song. Six deaths in a week; this was unusual. Kuanna resisted the urge to speak to the funeral party. After all, her tribe disowned her nine years ago for bringing misfortune to the village with the warring man that she chose to love. She had vowed to never return to the people who killed him.

So, she sat watching the road from the village into the jungle, long after the funeral party had disappeared. Their mournful song trailed off into the wilderness. Why she couldn’t leave the earshot of her village—her despicable, arrogant tribe’s village—she could never tell. Every time she tried to leave, a stubborn and unreasoned voice convinced her not to. “They will come to you”, it said. 

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The next day, a seventh funeral party came, singing and weeping as they carried their dead.

The next day, a seventh funeral party came, singing and weeping as they carried their dead. 

Then followed the eighth, the ninth, and soon, the thirty-eighth within twelve days. 

Kuanna boiled a broth of turmeric, ginger and sirimani roots and poured it into her largest dried gourd bottle. She packed the near-broken one of her knives and the older one of her only two rags; she knew that she wouldn’t be able to recover them from what she was setting out to do. Then, she waited for the thirty-ninth body. It came soon. As soon as the mourners left, singing their dreadful song, Kuanna walked over to the cemetery. She crouched near the body; it was a young girl. Her skin still held a trace of warmth to Kuanna’s touch. She had only died in the last few hours, Kuanna understood. The village must be sinking into panic now; they’re abandoning the dead and rushing the rituals. Kuanna took her old blade and dug it into the girl’s body and drew a smooth line from the throat to the groin. The line swelled in red as blood started oozing out. Kuanna began to examine the corpse, prodding its interiors with her knife.

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By the time Kuanna had reached the water stream, jackals had descended on the body. She heard their fervent fight for flesh in the distance. As if affected by the jackal’s urgency too, Kuanna set out to clean herself in a frenzy. That stench in the dead girl’s lungs…it wasn’t ordinary, Kuanna knew.

She poured the root boil from the gourd bottle into her palm and hurriedly rubbed it inside her nose. Then, she poured some into her mouth, gargled it in the throat and spat it out. She poured the remainder over herself and rubbed every inch of her body with it before immersing in the stream.

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Kuanna lay down on her mat and gazed at the sky through the torn thatch of the roof. The cobra that dwelled with her—Naga—slithered across the floor and curled up near her neck where warmth was gathering. Kuanna still remembered the stench from the dead girl’s lungs. It was putrid and had metallic tones to it. An element was deeply corrupted. What was it? She wondered. 

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That night, Kuanna dreamt of herself standing over the Earth. Its brown skin split open in a clean line that swelled with liquid red from the inside. From within it, came a flame; a red, orange and gold flame. It rose slowly into the air and halted in level with Kuanna’s eyes. Amidst the flame was water—rapidly swirling in a spiral. 

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Kuanna peeled the jungle to find wakapitha berries. She finally spotted the flame-red berries on a tree adjoining the hill. She broke open one of the berries—inside, its bright red exterior faded into orange, circling the golden yellow seeds at its heart arranged in a neat spiral. Kuanna tied a long strip of rag around her waist, and formed a pocket between its folds; then, she started climbing the knotty bark of the wakapitha to collect more.

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Kuanna placed the ground pack of medicine, tightly packed in banana leaf, in front of Naga’s face and laid down next to the cobra. She gazed into Naga’s eyes. In Kuanna’s mind’s eye, she could see the village clearly; the footpath from the jungle would get wider as it inched closer to the village. It was distinctly marked from where the road bringing carriages would meet the footpath. Beyond that, where the water wells were, there would always be women and men with pots. Nowadays, with death so thick in the air, their speech would be hurried and whispered. Some would look terrified, and others would be already broken.

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In the next few days, the villagers experienced something strange. A white cobra would slither near the well, drop off small packages wrapped in leaf, and slither back into the jungle. On the first two days, no one touched the package. On the third day, a man prodded it with a stick and unravelled the leaf. Other villages looked on; they gave him mixed instructions shouting from all directions. He shushed them and dug the end of his stick into the contents of the leafy package. Then he raised the stick to his nose as excited voices cried caution around him. 

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The eighth time that Naga returned from the village, Kuanna noticed that she was fed. The shape of three quail eggs in Naga’s belly was easily recognizable. The streak of white on her pink tongue meant milk. 

They have finally understood the medicine. 

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The processions of bodies eventually ceased, save the occasional. Kuanna watched the stars change patterns through the broken thatching of her roof.

One night, she dreamt of a line of black ants swarming near her feet as she slept. They swarmed at her feet, spilling out of her jungle hut, beyond the jungle and teeming along the footpath from the village.

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The next day, when Kuanna returned from the stream with her pot of water, there was a reed salver left in front of her jungle hut. It held fruits, betel leaves, a small bowl of rice cooked with coconut milk, plums, and nuts and six yards of crisp cotton folded neatly. 

An offering. 

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Kuanna’s story was written based on the historical character Kuwēni (also known as Kuanna) linked with the legends connected to the origin of Sinhalese people in Sri Lanka. Click here to read more and to sample this as a spoken story.

90 seconds

Nisha wrung herself from the police grip, calling to Ren; ‘Boiling kettle. On my desk…get it.’ Ren stood thunderstruck. ‘Just press the button! She begged, eyes boring into him. She had that look in her eyes, and he understood it.

Ren staggered—unable to turn away from police roughing Nisha onto the backseat. He ran upstairs, in a haze of disbelief.

Upstairs, on Nisha’s computer screen, the cursor blinked awaiting instructions. E-mail; No subject. Attachment; DefenceMinistryClassified.doc. Addressed to the newspaper editor. An electric urgency hung in the air, poised. Hearing heavy boots coming up the stairs, Ren tapped, ‘Send’.

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This was produced in response to a challenge to tell a story in less than 100 words. This story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.