

First 100% Crowdsourced Book (80 authors) - il
http://www.amazon.com/Not-Safe-Work-Neovella-ebook/dp/B004ZHE5I2/

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neoveller
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. :)

~~~
kirubakaran
Great work!

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sbisker
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-...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Dont-Do-It-Yourself-Start-a-Book-
Publishing-Empi/)

~~~
fearless
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.

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bitsm
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/>

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CountHackulus
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...](http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3411045)

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

~~~
neoveller
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>

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rogerbraun
[http://www.amazon.com/Aftershocks-Stories-Japan-
Earthquake-e...](http://www.amazon.com/Aftershocks-Stories-Japan-Earthquake-
ebook/dp/B004VP3KHK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A12MGAGPLUJEQK&s=digital-
text&qid=1305025597&sr=1-1)

This was a bit earlier.

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illumen
wiki

