5. A method comprising: receiving a draft of a work from an author for sharing with a plurality of readers; creating entries in an author activity log responsive to activities performed by the author that are associated with the draft of the work, wherein the activities comprise at least one of posting a new portion of the work, modifying the work, removing a portion of the work, viewing a comment about the work, or responding to a comment about the work; assigning a numerical value to individual ones of the entries in the author activity log; calculating, by a hardware processing unit, a likelihood of the author completing the work based at least in part on a formula that uses, as inputs, the numerical value assigned to the individual ones of the entries in the author activity log; receiving comments on the work from a plurality of contributors, the comments comprising feedback on the work for the author; analyzing text within the comments and characterizing the comments as positive or negative using natural language processing that associates a word in a comment of the comments with the comment being positive or negative; and calculating a success metric for the work, the success metric increasing as a number of comments characterized as positive increases.
5. A method comprising: receiving a draft of a work from an author for sharing with a plurality of readers; creating entries in an author activity log responsive to activities performed by the author that are associated with the draft of the work, wherein the activities comprise at least one of posting a new portion of the work, modifying the work, removing a portion of the work, viewing a comment about the work, or responding to a comment about the work; assigning a numerical value to individual ones of the entries in the author activity log; calculating, by a hardware processing unit, a likelihood of the author completing the work based at least in part on a formula that uses, as inputs, the numerical value assigned to the individual ones of the entries in the author activity log; receiving comments on the work from a plurality of contributors, the comments comprising feedback on the work for the author; analyzing text within the comments and characterizing the comments as positive or negative using natural language processing that associates a word in a comment of the comments with the comment being positive or negative; and calculating a success metric for the work, the success metric increasing as a number of comments characterized as positive increases. 6. The method of claim 5 , wherein the activities comprise at least two different types of activities that are each weighted differently when assigning the numerical value to the individual ones of the entries in the author activity log.