First 100% Crowdsourced Book (80 authors) | Hacker News Reader

First 100% Crowdsourced Book (80 authors)

amazon.com

54 pointsil11 comments

How does this relate to HN or tech startups, you may wonder? This past Valentines Day, you might remember a post called "Neovella: Instantly co-author stories with your friends (or strangers)!" Neovella.com enables streamlined collaboration in writing short stories, through a turn-based "exquisite cadaver" method.

The monetization scheme was to publish the best works from that mode of literary production, and take a 10% cut while redistributing the rest out to all the co-authors involved. This anthology is the result of that first experiment. Every story (17 included) was written turn-by-turn, ranging from 2 to 10 authors. Compared to a paperback novel, this would total somewhere near 120 pages.

As for the content--well, it's definitely a reflection of Internet culture. :)

Great work!

Not to take away from this work, but the title is wrong, or at least needs more specification. There's at least one book that was 100% crowdsourced before this:

"Amazing But True Cat Stories"... http://bjoern.org/projects/catbook/

All of the stories were written by users on Mechanical Turk, around 2008. The project got a lot of press and attention at the time, on O'Reilly, Boing Boing, and the like. The "author" also wrote a how-to on Instructables: http://www.instructables.com/id/Dont-Do-It-Yourself-Start-a-...

Are you sure you understand how this publication was "crowd-sourced"? Writers take turns contributing to a single plot/story--no one individual is writing anything cohesive on its own. The crowd-sourcing aspect is the fundamental production method.

I think the difference here is that this book is crowdsourced on a more granular level, by sentence. So every sentence in a single story could have been written by a different author.

I found another site similar to that, they're trying to beat the Guinness Record for the book with the most authors: http://wabblegame.com Still, http://neovella.com/ is probably a way better one.

First, I love this kinda stuff, but this is not exactly the first. SMITH magazine published Six-Word Memoirs in Feb. 2008 and made the NYTimes Bestseller list. The book had almost 800 authors, each of whom received a copy.

http://www.smithmag.net/sixwordbook/about/

For those that are interested, this book was the work of many people on the SomethingAwful forums. There's a thread about it here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=341...

Note that these are pay forums. Interesting to know the story behind it though.

Mostly correct. Only about half came from SA members, who were my fastest-adopting and highest-trafficking demographic upon launch. Their sense of humor also turned out to be quite a leap of unfathomable.

We're writing a new story right now, if anyone wants to watch. http://www.neovella.com/Reader.aspx?ID=836

http://www.amazon.com/Aftershocks-Stories-Japan-Earthquake-e...

This was a bit earlier.

wiki

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