A Million Little Authors

Piece by piece, a crowd writes a novel

Kristin Gorski interviews Jeremy Ettinghausen from "A Million Penguins" via telephone on May 11th, 2007

From the site: The buzz these days is all about the network, the small pieces loosely joined. About how the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. About how working together and joining the dots serves the greater good and benefits our collective endeavors.
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But what about the novel? Can a collective create a believable fictional voice?

Jeremy Ettinghausen has worked for Penguin Books for 10 years in a variety of roles including eBook Publisher, Audio Publisher and most recently Digital Publisher. He has been responsible for Penguin's foray into Second Life, the PenguinRemixed competition, The Penguin Blog and Podcast and recently, the Amillionpenguins wikinovel experiment.

Kristin Gorski: Did you get any geographic or demographic info on the participants?

Jeremy Ettinghausen: No, I didn’t. It was pretty anonymous. All people needed to do to register was supply an email address. We had got geographic data on the people who visited the site, but I can’t drill down from the visitors to participants, if you see what I mean.

So we had visitors from the site from over 130 countries but I would guess that because we asked people to write in English, unless there was a literary reason for not doing so, I would guess the majority of participants were from English-speaking countries. I know that there was a lot of discussion about wiki novel specifically in Spain, Italy and France, and I would guess that for most participants, the UK, the US and Australia would have been the main sources. But this is more of a guess than from having any data about this.

Q: This is a bit more anecdotally based. Did you get a sense of the kind of people that participated and if any of these people clustered together in groups?

A: I got the feeling that the more-committed people had written and were either unpublished novelists or people who had written in their spare time. I think that there were also groups of people who came from creative writing classes who took part in it to see how the process worked. So I think that it was more a literary crowd, than a technological crowd, though there was cross-over as well.

Q: How was the novel affected by the anonymity and did removing identity remove any responsibility people felt about behavior?

A: I think, yes. That was part of the point. We didn’t want this to be about people writing in the hopes that Penguin would notice them and sign them up for a book deal. That was very much not the idea of it, so it needed to be anonymous. And I think Margaret Atwood, who had talked about this on a radio program, and she took part, and said that it was a lot of fun, but that it was writing without responsibility. So I think it allowed people to be quite free in how they wrote, and that was the whole idea. It was anonymous, and it was a collective effort and not attributable to any particular person and that particular people’s writing could be identified from their finished text. The whole purpose was that it was anonymous and crowd-led, rather than ego-led.

Q: Do you feel the crowd had an overall tone to it?

A: There was quite a lot of discussion about that in the blog. There are a couple of posts by Jon Elek, who is the Penguin editor who was reading it [“A Million Penguins”] and commenting on it, and he said he found the tone to be quite humorous and also self-referential in this sort of post-modern way. So there were things where the process was talked about quite a lot, and he likened it to "The Simpsons" a bit. There was a lot of humor. And I think that probably also because of the nature of it, we didn’t get a coherent novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, and characters came and went, and so what you got was more a series of sketches possibly than one ongoing narrative.

Q: Did it seem, with this humor and self-reference, that overall people tried to really work together and collaborate?

A: I think there was kind of a mixture, and I was very aware that there were pockets of people who were working together, and people thanking each other for bits of sensitive editing, and there were places where a group of people went off; there’s an alternate version of the novel hidden away somewhere where I think three or four people went off and found somewhere where they didn’t get bothered too much and worked together quite well. I know from reading the discussion pages that somebody set up a wiki novel somewhere else and has invited some of the other people who worked on the [“A Million Penguins”] wiki to come and work together again on another collaborative project. So people did work together but in small pockets rather than en masse.

Q: Do you think that it’s possible that such a large crowd could work together on a novel fluidly and successfully?

A: I would say probably not, no. I think it’s unlikely. [Writing a novel] is very personal. It’s not like Wikipedia where there are facts that can be “that’s right” and “that’s wrong.” It’s a very personal thing. So you might have some people who luck into a small group of people who share your same tastes and the same style of writing, but opening it up to everybody, you’re likely to find other individuals and others who don’t share your style and tastes.

What I have learned is that it would be possible to crowdsource a novel, but I think it would have to be done in a more controlled way than we did. What we decided with “A Million Penguins” is that it was “all or nothing” and that the experiment was about: there are no rules, there are no breaks, there’s no quota of people — here’s a blank page, go for it.

The point of “A Million Penguins” was to see whether it was possible. If I was going to do it again, I’d say the goal of it is to produce a novel, and that’s a very different goal, and I’ve got some ideas now about the way to go about doing that.

Q: I was reading through the blog and all the different things that people were saying. Even though there seemed to be a fair amount of chaos, there seemed to be a lot of order. There were a lot of people driving it.

A: Yes. I was pleased about that.

Q: What percentage of that was chaos and order? I guess it’s hard to put a number on it because there were so many people.

A: It is hard to put a number on it. Let me see if I can go into it [the stats] quickly. I think I banned a very small number of people relative to the number of people who created log-ins. I think 30 people. So we had 1,500 accounts created, and of those, 30 were banned. I think that’s not chaos. That’s vandalism, really. That’s not a bad number.

Q: What kinds of things did people do to get banned specifically?

A: Destructiveness and/or obscenity. And I thought quite carefully about this. I didn’t ever ban anyone lightly and I don’t have any qualms at all about any of the people who were banned. There were a couple of people who just deleted everything, so that was an obvious ban. And then there was homophobic pornography put in, so I banned those. There were sex themes introduced that weren’t destructive and stayed, but if I felt that it was destructive obscenity, I had no problem with banning them.

Q: That leads into that it sounds like that people overall did really follow the ethical guidelines when they signed on.

A: Yes, I think they did. I was pleasantly surprised about how people were. And I thought there was going to be more vandalism. When we launched the project, it was a Wednesday, and I had in my head that there was a 30% chance that we’d have to take it down after the first weekend.

And on the Thursday and Friday, we were getting such an enormous amount of traffic, and it was so chaotic, that went up to about 50%. But after we got through the first weekend and things calmed down a bit, I was quite confident that we wouldn’t have to shut it down.

One thing that did scare me is that when somebody posted something that looked like a Harry Potter spoiler. I haven’t read any Harry Potter books and I was later told that it was actually something from the book that has been published. I thought that was more likely to get me into legal trouble and get the project closed down more than anything else.

Q: Then let me jump to this really quickly. It seems like there were some interesting parts written on the blog about the “bananapolisation” of “A Million Penguins”?

A: Yes, “Bananaman.”

Q: I haven’t laughed so hard in my life recently. That was some of the funniest stuff.

A: I thought it was really interesting, and I’m glad we took the course of action that we did with “Bananaman” because I think it made for some of the most interesting reading on the blog, as well. I think it was one of the most interesting things that has come out of the project.

Q: It seemed like from the [“A Million Penguins” blog] comments that I reading that there was a lot of support of keeping it. There was an air of mystery about who this was...

A: The thing with “Bananaman” is that he wasn’t a particularly disruptive vandal. It was cleverer than vandalism, and it wasn’t entirely random, the things that he was doing. There was one scene where somebody got stabbed with a kind of stiletto knife, and he changed “stiletto knife” to “a sharpened sliver of banana.” And so it was, let’s say, elegantly done, the things that he did. I felt that it was OK, and putting it up on the blog and talking about it, also, was a kind of slight warning to him that if he did start overwhelming the novel with banana themes then we would really have to really think about whether we banned him.

I wanted the whole process to be as transparent as possible, and I think the banana blog pages were an example of how we tried to involve people as much as we could in the ongoing process of the wiki novel.

Q: Did you ever find out who “Bananaman” was?

A: No. I’ve never tried to track down IP addresses or anything like that. There were some people who emailed me who put their addresses in, but I’ve never tried to track them down.

Q: And the person never stepped forward in a kind of “claim to fame” at the end?

A: No. We only have his user name.

Q: Are there any other stories you have about the exchanges between participants in the discussion area that were notable?

A: There was one quite interesting thing that happened that I haven’t really talked about very much before. We had one very active contributor, and one day, I found myself following the progress of the wiki novel by looking at the recent changes, seeing what people were doing. And I noticed this person deleting lots of bits and pieces here and there, whether it was a few characters or a few hundred characters, and looking at his user page then, he’d put something up about how he had put a comment on the blog and used his real name, and somebody else had tracked him down with his real name, found his MySpace page, and was inserting details from his real life back into the wiki novel. And he felt unhappy, understandably, about this. He never contacted us directly, but what he did instead was to remove all of his contributions from the wiki novel, character by character, and disappear.

He never contacted me, and I didn’t contact him — I didn’t think it was my business to — if he wanted to get in touch and say, “This is happening. This isn’t cool,” I’d have done something about it.

I could never find the bits that he was talking about of somebody else putting in his real life back into the novel. And then he reappeared again, sort of a week before the project finished, and carried on writing. So until this day, I’m still not sure whether what he was doing was a whole sort of little literary game, or whether it was actually real. I’ve got no idea. So that, I thought, was quite an interesting thing that happened.

Q: It seems like [“A Million Penguins”] was an interesting sociological study on people’s perceptions.

A: I think it became quite clear quite quickly that it changed from being a literary experiment to a social experiment. That was my feeling about it.

Q: In your opinion, what is the most surprising thing that came out of this?

A: The enthusiasm that people showed for it, for a project where there was no personal recognition. The amount of work and time some people put into it was really surprising and really encouraging. So those things were the things that really surprised me. And I think there were people that really did work together, that was also a very nice surprise.

Q: Do you know anybody who’s read “A Million Penguins” straight through? I know it’s quite long...

A: I don’t. I can’t say that I have. I know that the Penguin editor, Jon Elek has read quite a lot of it. I suspect that some of the people who were writing it might well have read the whole thing. But I can’t tell you categorically yes, this person has read the whole thing.

Q: If someone were to jump in to read “A Million Penguins,” do you have a recommended approach or any advice for them?

A: I always recommend that people start on the blog or the discussion pages first, before tackling the main body of it because I think that as much of it was about the process as it was about the end result, to be honest. And I think that quite a lot of the interest comes from the discussion and blog, as much as the actual novel itself.

Q: Will “A Million Penguins” ever be available for sale as an e-book?

A: I don’t think we’d try to sell it as an e-book. We are looking at how we can convert it into an e-book but it would be freely available. We’re not intending to sell it, partly because I think there are some very tricky questions about ownership and copyright involved, but also because I don’t think it would be fair on anybody to sell it. It will be freely available and is something we’re looking into at the moment.

Q: Were there any tech issues with the wiki that influenced the writing and editing?

A: There were a couple of things that we couldn’t do that we wanted to do. We wanted to limit the amount of words that anybody could add at any one time so that we didn’t get somebody uploading the novel that they had on their hard-drive, but we couldn’t do that. But apart from that, not particularly.

The wiki software is sort of user friendly, but it’s not super user friendly. Creating new pages — that’s one of the things we had to do in maintenance is break things up into separate pages. That got a bit messy, and there was one point where there were so many alternate versions of the novel — each with pages that were too long to be processed on a screen — that I just found myself absolutely confused and in danger of mixing up four different versions of the novel. I think I just about got away with it, and there were other people who helped me sort that out.

Mainly it was trying to restrict the number of words anyone could do at any one time. And I suppose the other thing — and this is something that I would want to look at doing, if we were to do it again with the view of actually creating a novel — I would want to separate distinct roles out so that you could have a writer or an editor, so the editors couldn’t add content and the writers couldn’t edit, if you see what I mean.

And the other thing I suppose is the ability to lock down passages — not have it as an all-or-nothing thing, so particular passages get locked down, particular pages once they’re written, but it’s quite hard to do that.

Q: It sounds like you all might be considering doing another one?

A: Well, I’m hoping somebody else is going to have a go. I’m not, at the moment. It was quite a lot of work and energy required over a very short period of time. I think the thing is that it’s given us an idea of how we might use wikis in the future for different sorts of projects.

Q: If Penguin were to do this again, what would you recommend would be changed. I know you mentioned separating the different roles...

A: There’s no point repeating the same thing again. If we were to do it again, it would have to be with a very clear goal of producing — we want to get a novel out of this, a credible piece of writing out of it. There are several things you’d have to do: separate the roles, you’d have to do it in multiple stages, so that you had a stage where people worked on a synopsis and a character list, a stage where people then developed chapter breakdowns, a stage where people worked on it chapter by chapter, and each stage was separate so that it went sequentially and didn’t all happen everywhere at once. And I think that you’d also have to restrict numbers, and there might have to be a screening process or something like that, because I think that opening it up to everybody, it would be very hard to produce a whole novel like that.

Q: Did anything go as you expected it would in this process or was this just a completely new learning process as the whole thing went along?

A: Was any of this predictable at the outset...I knew there would be vandalism. I think we were surprised at the amount of attention we got and the amount of publicity that it got, and so slightly overwhelmed by the level of traffic that we had, especially in the first week. That took us a bit, I suppose, and also that determined, first of all, what a lot of the publicity was going to say about it. We were getting 10 hits a second in the first few days, and so many people accessing it and making so many changes that it was absolutely chaotic, and that was reflected in what people were writing about it.

I think that we would probably do a bit more soft launch and build up slowly. I think it’s probably a reflection that the fact that at Penguin, we do get a lot of people interested in what we’re doing as a company, and that reflects in the amount of publicity we get in something like this. That surprised me.

What else...I was probably surprised at how little vandalism there was, relatively. It seemed a lot in the first few days, but after that, it calmed down quite a lot, so that was a nice surprise.

What else went as I expected...I think another thing I expected is that people would form little break-off areas, so there were some people who made sort of a “choose your own adventure” area, and I think that was a nice thing that the wiki could do is to give people the chance to do things, to find a little place where they could do their own thing.

I think the other thing that pleased me a lot was that there were a few people who used the technology in a really interesting way. There’s a person whose entire contribution was this: if you could into the wiki novel, you can go into the user list and look at “SunTzu” in the user list. I don’t know if you’ve seen this bit.

Q: I did not see this part.

A: His entire contribution was to write one sentence in his user name, and each letter in that sentence is a link out to another page that he created with a line from “The Art of War” in it. I thought that was really nice.

There’s another passage where somebody wrote a paragraph, and each word in that paragraph is a link to a definition of that word that he wrote. I think those are really nice little touches. People using the technology really nicely.

Q: Wrapping this up, and I really appreciate your time.

A: No, not a problem at all.

Q: What was the first thing you did when this whole intense process concluded?

A: The first thing I did when it finished...I suppose I blogged about it. And I think the other thing that we were very clear about is that any success we had was due to the people participating in it. And so the first thing I did was blog and thank them for participating.

Q: Do you feel the process was very transparent?

A: Yes, I don’t think we did anything without talking about it first. And I think the other thing is that we went into it very clearly saying that we didn’t know how it was going to turn out. We didn’t know what was going to happen and that we might have to change our course as we went along. And so we would, for instance, lock things down for a couple of hours every couple of days to give us a chance to catch our breaths, and we talked about why we were doing that. So I think we were very clear from the beginning that we didn’t know what was going to happen.

We had a goal in mind that it was an experiment, and we were all in it together. I was always really grateful that Penguin, being a big corporation, gave me the license to experiment, as well.

Q: Exactly how long was the process from when the novel opened up to when it concluded?

A: Five weeks.

5/17/07