Social networks help writers, readers and publishers share stories instantly, but they don’t help us archive those stories for future reading.

The Storify platform will help you quickly preserve everything from Twitter posts to photographs to YouTube videos to news stories on a simple, informative page. Below, we’ve listed five ways authors and publishers can use Storify for literary creations.

Here’s more about the tool: “We make it easy to do [to create] by just dragging-and-dropping, creating beautiful, simple stories. We preserve all attribution and metadata for each element. We let you notify all the sources quoted in a story with one click, a great way to help it go viral. Stories with Storify are interactive, and your readers can re-Tweet or reply to the people quoted in stories. Also, Storify’s API opens up new possibilities for developers to display stories in new ways and on different devices.”

1. Collect all stories surrounding a piece of literary news. We made a Storify post about how publishing folks responded to the earthquake in Virginia. Start with a news story, and then mix in social network opinions.

2. Create a tribute to your favorite author. We built a quick collection of tributes to Steve Jobs last night.  We started with a news story about Jobs, adding video and Twitter tributes.

3. Collect book reviews and articles about a new book. As you can see this post on Haruki Murakami‘s Norwegian Wood, we included a Google Books link, social media responses, Flickr photos and news stories about the book.

4. Preserve news and ideas from a publishing conference or industry expo. From book parties to BookExpo America to the Publishing App Expo, most of our posts about an event evaporate within weeks. Save all your posts and digital photographs in a single Storify page so you never lose the experience.

5. Highlight a specific literary conversation on Twitter or Facebook. When Twitter hashtags like Undatable in Lit or Why I Write get popular on Twitter, you can link to the article that started it all, save your favorite posts and share them with readers on Storify. Follow the same formula for literary controversies on Facebook like the “I Hate Reading” Facebook page.