Crowdsourcing the Writing Process

by Jarrett Martineau | April 14, 2008 at 02:25 pm | 225 views | 1 comment

National Library Week: April 13 - 18, 2008

Last year, I had the opportunity to participate in the experimental 'meta-crowdsourcing' projectAssignment Zero, with Jay Rosen, Wired, and the folks at NewAssignment.net, which undertook to explore all of the ways that crowdsourcing is being employed to complete a wide range of collaborative tasks and initiatives.

In 2007, the term was an internet buzzword gaining momentum, and seemingly anything and everything was being fed through the crowdsourcing filter.

But a year on, now that some of the term's suggestive sheen has worn off, the collaborative 'wise crowd' model appears to be being applied in a much more focused and directed manner.

Although its success as a viable business strategy has still yet to be proven, web start-up WEBook is hoping to succeed by enabling aspiring writers to collaborate on the writing, production, and publication of user-generated books.

WEbook, which launched last week, invites writers, editors, topic experts and anyone else who has something to say to put their virtual pens together to work on literary projects. If the finished works get high marks from the site's members, WEbook publishes hard copies and sells them through online booksellers such as Amazon.com and retail stores including Barnes & Noble. Some books can also be read via mobile phones or in e-book format.

WEbook's first published novel, a 58-chapter thriller called "Pandora," was written by 17 people and will hit shelves next week.

By adopting the growing crowd-sourcing model, which aims to tap into the wisdom of a wide range of people, and the collaborative style of Wikipedia entries, WEbook hopes to help frustrated writers realize their potential.

WEbook has attracted some strong web 2.0 investment interest. Given the mixed success of 'A Million Penguins' and other finite crowdsourcing book projects, I am interested to see if WEbook's model will be sustainable in the long term.

The company has received the financial backing of Greylock Partners, an early investor of social-networking site Facebook, social-news site Digg and online-ad firm DoubleClick, which was just purchased by Google. In addition to its five-person staff in Bethesda, WEbook has a small development team in Mountain View, Calif., where Google also is headquartered. Founder Itai Kohavi, who got the idea for the company while trying to write a children's book, lives in Israel.

WEbook plans to pull in revenue by selling content produced on the site, mostly through hard copies of books, e-books or even audio books. For works not selected for publication, the company will give members the option of self-publishing their manuscripts through WEbook. Eventually, the site plans to charge for premium listings for highly skilled writers or book promotions.

WEbook isn't the first to experiment with collaborative publishing. Last year, Penguin Books in Britain launched a wikinovel project called "A Million Penguins" to see what happens when dozens of people weigh in on the plot, characters and title of a manuscript. Book publisher HarperCollins tried a similar venture by letting teens contribute chapters for a teen novel, now available as an e-book. Each November, National Novel Writing Month, thousands of aspiring writers gather in groups across the country to hammer out 50,000-word novels in social settings.

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Swan

at 15:00 on April 14th, 2008

good stuff:

Hello Jarrett,

If any story is Good Stuff, this one surely is just that! I plan to seriously check out both websites and even register to collaborate on various stories.

Thank you so much for this story and the links!
~ Swan