OutSourcedEmpire.com

Trawling the net for information on some of my ideas I stumbled across a Wikipedia entry about Scriblist.com

This was a collaborative writing project which ultimately created a book called ‘Five Green Bannanas‘. Unfortunately the website no longer exists but the book is still listed on Amazon and has 10 authors listed for the book.

The basic premise was a competition where authors would submit a chapter to a story. The various chapters would then be voted on with the best 5 been chosen to start five stories. Authors were then invited to write the next chapter for any of the stories and the voting process repeated itself until the five stories were completed. The process wasn’t completely democratic as a panel had the final say on what chapters would be chosen.

It’s not clear where the proceeds from the book went but one would assume that it either went to the authors or to support the project as, before the site disappeared, there was talk of producing book 2.

This project shows the ability to harness induviduals intrest and creativity to create a product with only a small amount of administrative effort. Competitions help get people more interested even without the prospect of a physical reward. The process could be extended to any type of book from comics to a photographic collection.

My brother is currently writing his 4th year dissertation for his industrial design course at Nortumberland Univeristy. Whilst researching he came across a writer who was writing a book about crowdsourcing and as part of the book decided to use the readers of his blog to proof read his first draft and provide suggestions.

All this got me thinking. How easily and cheap could commission a book on the web? Is there any was to reduce the cost by using free services or crowdsourcing? What kind of book best lends itself to this type of project?

From my time aimlessly surfing I remembered about an on demand book printer Blurb. There are many other services (some listed at the bottom of this post) offering similar things many with competitive prices which leaves the printing of the book taken care of.

Now for a slightly more difficult task - writing the book!

Other on demand book printing services:

Lulu, My Publisher, iUniverse, Picaboo, Booksurge, Qoop, Xlibris