Will The Crowdsourced Novel AirBorne Take Flight?
It’s always fun to watch new creative experiments on the Internet play out. When it comes to novelists dabbling in the electronic realm, I fondly recall Stephen King’s The Plant, “a serial novel published in 2000 as an e-book.”
King wanted to see if people would voluntarily pay $1.00 for each installment versus the option to download for free. Perhaps an early sign of things to come, many people chose not to pay, resulting in the story — a rather fascinating one if you’re interested in how the publishing world worked in the New York City of the 1980s, before the age of the Internet — never being completed in full.
Now we have AirBorne, “the world’s first chain novel inspired by James Patterson.” The concept is that best selling thriller writer Patterson will write the first and last chapter of this “crowdsourced” novel. The 28 of 30 “middle chapters” will be written by selected writers, who get the honor of writing one chapter apiece. Presumably, the writer of chapter 14 has to wait until the first 13 chapters are completed, or have a strong idea of what’s going on in the story, to pick things up. That fact alone must have made this project a logistically challenging one.
(read the rest of this piece at louisgray.com)
