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.
5/17/07
