[Wōdnes-dæg] Crowdsourcing + Crowdfunding = Novel?

Introduction
The Article Summed Up
A Novel Form of Community?
A Return to Crowd-Sourcing Stories
Closing

{An image from when novels were still novel. Image found on Wikipedia.}

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Introduction

While getting through the newspaper backlog resulting from a five day absence, I stumbled upon an article on the front page of the Arts section of Tuesday's Globe and Mail.

Immediately, the headline "Please write his book" caught my eye, and I knew that it had to be the subject of this week's editorial (beating out an article from Monday's paper about the usefulness of drones for Arctic "surveillance and sovereignty").

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The Article Summed Up

Daniel Perlmutter, a filmmaker and writer from Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is not only crowdfunding his first novel, but he's crowdsourcing it as well.

However, instead of offering incentives like copies of the book, or special objects related to its creation, he's instead offering different elements of the novel itself. For 1000$, in fact, a backer can tell Perlmutter how the book ends.

Despite the hodgepodge of responses that this approach is likely to generate, Perlmutter has said "no matter what the project ends up being, it's going to be comedic in nature, just because of the very process."

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A Novel Form of Community?

First and foremost Perlmutter definitely deserves notoriety. Undoubtedly many people have tried to crowdfund their writing in the past (possibly even offering similar incentives), but that it's happening (again?) is great news.

A video game is something that can provide great entertainment and can tell excellent stories.

A piece of music or an album is something that can create a great atmosphere or provoke deep thoughts.

A piece of art or a graphic novel can plunge the depths of human experience and present what was found at its nadir in an easily digestible form that may just be as deep as the experience itself.

All of these media are represented on sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but books seem like hard sells on these sorts of platforms.

If something goes wrong with a piece of art, music, or digital entertainment, there are options. Art can be hung and forgotten, or accumulate value. Music can be passively enjoyed or remixed into something else. Video games that fail to deliver can be lampooned or re-made into something else.

But if a book fails to deliver, the disappointment can be palpable.

But that's where Perlmutter's project shines.

The success of so many crowdfunding projects hasn't come entirely from the promise of what was ultimately to be delivered, but because they pulled on the heartstrings of a community (thereby loosening its purse strings).

And that's exactly what Perlmutter's project does - it turns the creation of a novel from something solitary into something communal. Again, something done before, but with the power of the internet, the reach and grasp of such a project are greatly increased.

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A Return to Crowd-Sourcing Stories

Truly fascinating about Perlmutter's novel-to-be, though, is that crowdsourcing a work of fiction might just be the oldest way of making works of fiction.

Oral traditions, though often passed from generation to generation with the utmost care, would definitely have been subjected to additions or subtractions based on what the group performed for wanted (the original perhaps privately retained by the singer or maybe kept in a more occult tradition). And adjusting material to the desires of an audience is something that every successful artist does.

Thus, Perlmutter's project, and any others like it, are strange examples of some of the oldest reasons for crowdsourcing stories being brought into the internet age.

There might not be a campfire, and there may not be anyone in the audience who could lop off a head for a line that goes amiss, but the project definitely speaks to the human desire for community and for stories.

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Closing

Tomorrow, another set of annotated links will be posted, and on Friday watch for the search for the good in The Season of the Witch, part two of Nicolas Cage month.

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