Crowdsourcing Doesn't Guarantee Quality... But It Can Be Great Advertising

from the to-crowdsource-or-not-to-crowdsource dept

Earlier this month, BBC Audiobooks America started an audiobook project based on Twitter messages where Neil Gaiman kicked off an exquisite corpse process of stringing together about 1,000 Tweets to forge a storyline. Dozens of Twitter users contributed tweets to be edited into a coherent plot that will be released as a free audiobook download. From this publicity stunt, an approximately 50-page book (or 2-hr audiobook, actually) has been created from Gaiman's fans. And presumably, the collection of tweets could also be remixed and edited -- and improved -- to possibly gain further participation from Gaiman (who contributed the first line of the story and will read aloud the completed audiobook) and the attention of any number of other authors. It's not exactly a brand-new idea to compose a story in this way, but it's a very interesting way to advertise and connect with fans to whet their appetites for more content to come (and even pay for).

However, the crowdsourcing aspect of this particular audiobook has been criticized in detail for exhibiting the worst of literary clichés as well as a meandering plot with too many characters and unresolved arcs. But generalizing this crowd's apparently unsatisfying result to all possible collaborative-author processes seems a bit disingenuous. Perhaps it's one of my pet peeves, but the schadenfreude surrounding crowdsourced works that aren't "as good as Shakespeare" seems to focus too much on some artificial failure, and not the potential or the realized successes. Maybe fiction isn't the best target for collaborative authorship, but the suggestion that collaborative writing won't ever work for good storytelling is far from proven. In fact, many popular stories (TV shows, etc) are written by teams of authors. (So the question could be posed: where does the optimal number of authors arise?) Conversely, the overwhelming number of unsuccessful stories written by single authors should not discourage writers from working alone, either. Bad stories happen.

The real triumph of this crowdwork is that this experiment engaged with its audience and promoted Gaiman and BBCAA for future works. From the BBC's perspective, a ton of content was generated largely for free, and a promotional audiobook was created in just a few days. Had the BBC commissioned a single author to compose a similar work, there wouldn't be any guarantees of a compelling book in the end. And working with a single author might require more complex licensing rights and royalties. So crowdsourcing this project sounds like an advertising coup -- generating a promotion appropriately disguised as free content. It's not Shakespeare, but it's a whole lot better than a banner ad, right?

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Watch Neil Gaiman Read His Whole Latest Book Online For Free... And Note That It's Still A Best Seller

from the yeah,-but,-free-doesn't-work dept

Famed author Neil Gaiman certainly is no stranger to embracing the economics of free infinite goods to help sell more not-free scarce goods. Richard now points us to yet another way that's working for Gaiman. In a new blog post about a just completed book tour for his new children's book, The Graveyard Book, Gaiman notes two interesting points. First, during the book tour, at each stop he read a different chapter of the book outloud -- and each of those stops was filmed and put online. So, as he notes: "For now, the whole book is up online for free and I have no plans to take it down."

At the same time (or, actually, just before that), he also mentions that the book is number one on the NY Times' bestsellers' list for children's books. As Richard notes, this seems to fit the model we discuss all the time: "Give away a transient copy in one medium, while selling lots and lots of copies in another, more natural and permanent medium? Who'd have thought that would work...?" Indeed.

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Yet Again, Giving Away Free eBook Increased Sales Of Author's Books

from the and-again-and-again-and-again dept

Someone pointed this out on Friday, but I thought we've seen so many stories of it that it didn't necessarily merit mentioning. However, all weekend long more people submitted it, so perhaps it is worth pointing out. Neil Gaiman, who was part of Harper Collins experiment with giving away free ebooks, discovered (like so many others) that giving away the free ebooks helped increase sales. And, of course, it wasn't just for the one book that was offered for free, but across all of Gaiman's works. The other bit of information is that, as we expected, HarperCollins found that many people were not at all happy with all of the restrictions it put on the ebooks (including that you had to read it on their website rather than download it):

Response to our Browse Inside Online Reader was mixed -- with 44% saying they enjoyed the experience at 56% saying they did not. The chief complaints were that you had to have an internet connection to read the book, you had to scroll to see the whole page and that the load time was sometimes slow. 69% of respondents said that they would like to be able to download. Some people complained that since they couldn’t bookmark where they left off, they got lost between reading sessions.

Of course, plenty of people pointed this out when Harper Collins first announced the plan. But, better late than never. Gaiman notes: "the 56% of people who didn't enjoy the online reading experience may be a lot happier with how we do it next time out."

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Neil Gaiman On JK Rowling, Fair Use And The Flattery Of Derivative Works

from the flattery-will-get-you-everywhere dept

Copyfight points us to a fun blog post from Neil Gaiman where he discusses the lawsuit involving the "Harry Potter Lexicon" that JK Rowling is so upset about. He makes a bunch of good points about fair use and derivative works, saying that he'd be flattered if someone had done something similar with his works, and also notes that his own first books probably could be found as violating copyrights as well, and he's happy that no one acted like Rowling in trying to sue him for his work:

Lots of emails from people asking me to comment on the JK Rowling/ Steve Vander Ark copyright case. My main reaction is, having read as much as I can about it, given the copyright grey zone it seems to exist in, is a "Well, if it was me, I'd probably be flattered", but that obviously isn't how J.K. Rowling feels. I can't imagine myself trying to stop any of the unauthorised books that have come out about me or about things I've created over the years, and where possible I've tried to help, and even when I haven't liked them I've shrugged and let it go.

Given the messy area that "fair use" exists in in copyright law I can understand the judge not wanting to rule, and assume that whatever he says the case will head off to the court of appeal.

My heart is on the side of the people doing the unauthorised books, probably because the first two books I did were unauthorised, and one of them, Ghastly Beyond Belief, would have been incredibly vulnerable had anyone wanted to sue Kim Newman and me on the grounds that what we did, in a book of quotations that people might not have wanted to find themselves in, went beyond Fair Use.

He also goes on to note, if somewhat tangentially, that others have accused Rowling of copying his own works -- specifically The Books of Magic that involve a young magician "with potential" who (at one point) goes off to a magic school. Gaiman points out that he does not believe Rowling took the idea from him (or even that she read his works), but that people writing within a certain genre are always going to overlap with ideas -- some of which they glean from others and some of which they come up with themselves. And that's a good thing. It's only in this unfortunate era when people seem to think that all ideas must spring brand new from a virgin mind that the ideas of sharing, building on the works of others and creating new derivative works are seen as being bad.

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