“One of the biggest trends in media today is that it is getting more conversational, so it should be no surprise that more and more books will be written in this way,”

Web 2.0 is here with Facebook, Orkut, Twitter ets defining the day for many. It may not be mainstream yet, but it has certainly added a two way collaboration possibility to the erstwhile one way process of writing. It builds a relationship between the author and the reader before, during and after the process of writing. Can a best selling novel be written on Facebook? Can a novel have 1500 authors?  Neha Tara Mehta of Mail Today newspaper writes about all this and more on 28 Dec 2008.

Nearly 1,500 authors from 83 countries and 63,200 words of text. Their writing medium? A website that was accessed six lakh times from March to July this year. The goal? Making it to the Limca Book of Records for being the largest number of co-authors writing a single book.

It was at 2.30 pm this January 21 that the yet untitled book — which is now going through its final round of edits — was conceived by two IIM-Indore students over Maggi instant noodles and coffee. Dhruv Bhushan, 23, and Anubhav Jain, 24, while preparing for CAT in Delhi, had decided to launch their own venture one day. “We wanted to create employment and make money,” says Jain. As campus placements were underway, they still hadn’t finalised the business plan for the million-dollar baby of their dreams.

“Many of our business ideas required huge capital. That’s when we hit upon this idea. Most people want to write but don’t have the time or the forum to do so,” says Bhushan. That was how the website named OurOwnBook.com was born. The idea was to give people the beginning of a story, let them build on it collaboratively, and take the final product to the publishers.

With this venture, Bhushan and Jain joined a growing community of people writing “crowdsourced” books. The concept is this: either a plot or a chapter is put online for anyone to add on, or entries are invited for a web book or part of a book that will remain online or may be published eventually, depending on its popularity.

Such collaborative efforts have taken off in a big way. For instance, Sulekha.com just published a book in collaboration with Penguin India called Blog Print, a collection of winning entries from an online contest.

Bhushan and Jain came up with the plotline catering to their target audience of well-educated, aspiring authors between 20 and 30. “Our story starts with a well-educated, modern man who had a humble beginning. He opts out of the corporate world to do his own thing. Somewhere, the story of our own lives was being reflected in this,” says Bhushan.

On the midnight of March 4-5 this year, the site was launched with the grand capital of Rs 3,000. Uma Parvathy, the duo’s junior at IIM-Indore, did the coding for the site for free. Bhushan and Jain ran a teaser campaign on their gchat status messages, Facebook and Orkut. “We received the first contribution within 5 minutes of launching the site,” says Bhushan.

They got a trademark on Collaborative Book Building (CoBooBu) and their catchline ‘Anyone Can Write’. “The foremost challenge was to maintain the flow and coherence in the story. We moderated the entries and prepared summaries on a daily basis — giving cues to the writers to stick to the basic plotline,” says Jain.

The two are already working on product placements in the first book. “After this, we will get into multiple genres — biographies, fiction, non-fiction, and even give individuals the control to start their own collaborative books. The best parts would be taken forward for publishing — and even sold as movie scripts,” says Bhushan.

Taking the write cue

Abhijit Bhaduri, best-selling author of Mediocre But Arrogant, had a special group of people to thank in the preface of his latest book, Married But Available( HarperCollins). They were the 180 readers who had formed an Orkut community dedicated to his book two years back. “I started interacting with the community and leveraging their collective wisdom on what the sequel should be like,” says Bhaduri, an HR professional.

Among the questions Bhaduri put forth to the Orkut community readers were: “What would the protagonist Abbey’s first day at work be like? What kind of a boss would he have? What would his first decade in corporate India be like?” Readers shared with him stories from their personal and professional lives. “I used those inputs to create a plotline that was often counter-intuitive or different from what was expected.”

Bhaduri also used his website, Facebook page and online chats to ideate with readers. “Writing has traditionally been an individual effort. Technology makes it possible to brainstorm with the readers. Isn’t that really cool?” And it was the readers who goaded him into completing the second novel sooner than he would have. “I felt very accountable to them,” he says.

The age of Blooks

One of the most ambitious collaborative efforts online, the Age of Conversation (AOC) books, started last March with a comment on a blog. US-based marketer Drew McLellan, among the 25 most-read marketing bloggers, had blogged about Wharton’s ‘We Are Smarter Than Me’ project — an open invitation to write in a business book. Gavin Heaton, a leading marketing blogger from Australia, read his post and commented: “Great concept. But you know what, Drew? I reckon between a few of us we could knock out a short book and publish it.”

Three e-mails later, they decided to come up with a book that was quick, exciting and inclusive and challenged bloggers around the world to have a page-long conversation, 400 words each, on the topic of conversation.

Within three months, the first AOC book was out, written by over a hundred people from 14 countries who have met only on the blogosphere.

Less than a year later, the book had clambered to a high No. 36 on Amazon’s bestseller business booklist, and raised $15,000 for Variety, an international children’s charity.

“We took an idea, pulled together a community, collected the content, edited together and published it via Lulu.com — a self-publishing print-on-demand system — all within three months,” says McLellan, the American blogger.

Through the entire process, McLellan and Heaton never met. In fact, they didn’t even speak. “The closest we came was a very fuzzy Skype call that we gave up on,” says Heaton.

Gaurav Mishra, a popular marketing blogger and a Yahoo! Fellow in International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet at Georgetown University, was one of the contributors to AOC. “Imagine a hundred strangers writing a book and then taking it to No. 36 on Amazon. It’s a mind-bending thought. This was a live case study on the power of social media collaboration,” he says.

The sequel – Age of Conversation 2: Why Don’t They Get It? was launched in October. This time, with 237 marketing professionals who blog in the U.S. and 15 other countries.

With book writing becoming a contributory effort it is bound to get popular. Washington-based contributor Rohit Bhargava, author of Personality Not Included and SVP Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, expects more such online collaborative books in the future.

“One of the biggest trends in media today is that it is getting more conversational, so it should be no surprise that more and more books will be written in this way,” he says.

Facebook literature

The AOC ‘blook’ was a conceived on a blog and its writers sourced on blogs.

Not surprisingly, a blog – www.ageofconversation. com – along with an array of social media was used to promote it. A huge social media ‘bum rush’ was organised to push the book on the Amazon bestseller list this March 29. This was orchestrated by Chris Wilson, a member of AOC’s “global marketing community”, but not a contributing author.

Wilson laid out a plan of action that entailed creating a buzz about the book on social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, and adding the posts on other social media outlets like Technorati, Ma.gnolia, Furl, BlinkList, Newsvine and Facebook.

Even sending an “old-fashioned email” to friends about the book was encouraged. “The word was out — with all contributing authors blogging and twittering about the book, commenting, digging, stumbling and bookmarking … the news moved forward virally across the networks of each of the authors,” says Vandana Ahuja, a visiting professor at JP Institute of Information Technology University, NOIDA, and an AOC-2 contributor.

Oman-based contributing author Arun Rajogopal posted a series of brief introductions on every author. Another contributor created and administered a Facebook group for AOC’s contributors and friends. Some of the authors interviewed others for their podcasts.

At 2 pm on March 28, AOC was at No. 102,282 on the Amazon bestseller list. “The following day, we got as high as No. 36 on the bestselling business books list and No. 262 on the overall bestsellers list,” says McLellan.

Is AOC a prototype of the books of the future? “Traditional publishing has great value in terms of editing, packaging, marketing and distributing the book. Most authors would prefer to have a big publisher behind their book. The point is that it’s not the only option anymore,” says Mishra. So if you have been frustrated in your efforts to get a book through to a publisher, a better way may be to join one of these collaborative efforts on a social network site. You may just get more readers than if you have a book published.