NaNoWriMo: Author as Entrepreneur and Lean Publishing

That's basically what Hugh Howey did. His short story "wool" took off and so he focused his efforts on that story line.

Two ways to do it are short stories or serialization. If you look into how Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, they definitely had a feedback loop going.

I think what others have posted about serialization, character pieces, or short stories are all ways novels can make sense of the MVP concept of lean. There are also sites such as Wattpad that allow the author to publish as they go and get crowd feedback. They can then rework sections based on how fans react to characters, story arcs, etc.

You feel that the two are mutually exclusive?

I definitely can understand the frustration with thinking of the book as a product or business but in some ways it is. I think what is different in how I conceive of a product in this post is that in many ways the product (whether a novel, piece of literature, film, painting, etc.) is never finished. It is always a work in progress, a coming-to-be. I did my graduate work in philosophy and multimedia creative works at the European Graduate School, which took a smattering of filmmakers, philosophers, artists, etc. to come together and produce. I found an interesting commonality in the creative process amongst all of them. That commonality was that inevitably the creative work was produced for someone - the customer, viewer, listener, audience. And in that way creative works are a dialogue with an-other. This is what lean is all about at heart. It is making whatever you are working on a dialogue with someone else and incorporating that feedback into the build-measure learn loop.

I, however, do not think that the two are mutually exclusive and even if you are only concerned with the work as an artistic creation, the relationship between the author and the audience is still important.