Penguin UK Launches First Wiki Novel
|
Written By Kate Zimmermann | February 1, 2007 | Share This
|
|
Penguin Books has released its first wiki-based novel, A Million Penguins. The collaborative novel went live on thursday, and will test the “crowd” as a collective author. Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin UK told CNET,
“This is an experiment. It may end up like reading a bowl of alphabet spaghetti…We are not making any predictions. It would be utterly fantastic if we could at the end create a print remix.”
A million Penguins blogger “jon” has a rather hesitant post for the writing community,
“If you’re thinking of contributing to the wikinovel, please be prepared to put in a bit of time familiarizing yourself with what’s already up on the screen. This means getting to grips with things like its genre, context, characterization, narrative development and tone. In an ideal world we could throw in a sense of plausibility, balance and humour. That’s asking a lot, and in truth I’ll be happy so long as it manages to avoid becoming some sort of robotic-zombie-assassins-against-African-ninjas-in-space-narrated-by-a-Papal-Tiara type of thing. Or whatever.”
Its clear that penguin is approaching this project anxiously - could it really produce the next great American novel? Or will it inevitably become a sea of jibberish? I wonder how much editorial control Jon will exert of the novel’s development, and how much editing he’ll entrust to the crowd.
Topics: Uncategorized |