Agile Novel Development
In a previous journal entry, I described a model for selling a story idea that someone else could turn into a book or comic. I had hoped to refine it into a functional (theoretically functional, at least) sales method, but it seems that I was trying to build on a shaky foundation. Commenters took the position that most artists prefer to work as auteurs, as there's no possible way that anyone but the idea's originator could do a good job with it. Since most of us aren't professionals, it's not a surprising philosophy, although most of what we produce- fanworks- are testaments to the effectiveness of producing an idea that someone else came up with. (Hollywood is another testament.)
However, one line of thought especially jumped out at me. On my livejournal, LaLunatique shared a great article that outlined the history of Publishing and the role of the Author in the evolving sales model, ending with the assertion that the changing marketplace (online versus bookstores, grassroots over corporate publishing, etc.) will yield a new manifestation of the old concept of an Author. The article can be read here, and I recommend it as much for its exciting and punchy style as for the learning opportunity it offers. The article really got me thinking and one idea especially won my infatuation:
What if the next evolution of the Author is from a single, credited person to a team of interchangeable people?
The strengths of this are obvious. You can get great idea people, great writers, great communicators, great editors, and great promoters all put together in a team dedicated to creating the best book they can. The main focus of the team would be on producing something that is simultaneously art and entertainment. (With more emphasis on the entertainment than the art, if there's a conflict between the two.) Naturally, the normal rules about teams need to be applied. Everyone has to get along, believe in the end goal, be able to work effectively together, and so on. Preferably, there would be a "manager" instead of a "leader," a person who takes point on organizing and troubleshooting instead of making decisions for the rest of the group, but every team has its own optimally functional culture.
Before everyone protests this idea, LaLunatique provided an example of this type of thing in action already. Anyone heard of the group of manga producers called CLAMP? If not, Wikipedia has a short description of their collaborative work process here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clamp_(manga_artists)#Business_model It seems they've managed to achieve some level of success. A similar example outside of the writing/art industries is Valve, a computer game company that does all their own development and publishing without leaders or major public figures, and is known as a strong brand that produces reliably good video games.
In my own day job as a web developer for a large corporation, I've had years of experience with a team model. We use a software development method known as "Agile Development," which is geared towards producing quality product with low turnaround time using a collaborative approach. My own company doesn't exactly use a pure version of this, but the strength of Agile is that it's very flexible, and every company can implement a flavor that works best for them. The basic idea is that you take a final product, and break it up into 'features,' which are then broken up into smaller tasks that can be completed in several days. Over a period of two to three weeks, the team works together to implement a set of features, with the idea that at the end of the working period, the group will have a minimally functional software that can be used as the base for the next set of features. The people on the team can have specialties (User Interface developer, Requirements writer, Tester, and many possible others) but the central idea to Agile Development is that the entire team can 'swarm' on a task or feature that needs to be completed quickly. For example, if you're coming up on the end of the working period and a lot of stuff still needs to be tested, everyone drops what they're doing and becomes a Tester.
Of course, Agile Development has its own challenges, but what methodology doesn't? Being very familiar with it, I got to thinking about how a similar system might be used to collaboratively produce a novel.
First, let's set our goal: to produce, publish, and sell a novel without a major publishing house being involved.
Now, what will we need to accomplish this?
Writer(s)
Editor(s)
Cover Artist
Promoter(s)
Distributor
Writer: This one is fairly obvious. A writer is someone who creates the words of the actual story. Even now, writers can collaborate on a single book, but in my idea for a team approach, this could be extended beyond that. Perhaps there are two 'primary' writers on a book assignment, but then you have other secondary writers who handle special assignments like action scenes or dialogue-heavy scenes, or even just contribute a few passages here because they have a good idea for the presentation. They would work from a full outline of the plot, and perhaps each chapter could be a single assignment.
Editor: There are different kinds of editors. The kind most of us are familiar with are "copy editors," the people who proofread and point out spelling errors, typos, grammar problems, and so on. Yes, this is a separate job in today's world. "Pure" editors are becoming endangered, and are the people who read your book and then send it back talking about how your story lacks focus, the main character's arc was unintentionally subverted by the events of chapter 24, and you could strengthen the narrative by streamlining that sequence there about two-thirds of the way through the book. Ideally, the person providing this kind of editing is not also a writer on the book. These days, the author's agent is expected to perform this kind of duty to save the publisher time and money.
Cover Artist: The person who makes the cover! They can paint a masterpiece showing an epic battle between a knight and a dragon, or simply put the title of the book in fancy letters on top of a green box for a minimalist effect. This person isn't just someone who can draw or photoshop, but someone who understands how to sell the book with a single image and make it stand out on the bookshelves or the Amazon results list or whatever.
Promoter: It used to be that this was the job of the big publishing house (aside from the binding and printing process, which are now available to everyone and their dog at a good price). Writers, by definition, should be able to communicate ideas to lots of people, but the sad fact is that a lot of the people writing sci-fi and fantasy books are really lousy salespeople. The publishers would organize ad campaigns, signings, arrange for prominent placement in the best bookstores, line up reviews from prominent figures, and lots of other interesting stuff. Now that we have this thing called the internet, though, publishers expect authors to do more of their own promotion via Facebook and blogs and other such venues. A dedicated promoter would make this their primary concern, buying ads on websites, organizing the team's blog, running contests on the team's Facebook page, and other such activities. This is a fact of the publishing world now, and it strikes me that having a dedicated expert is better than making a writer with no talent for it learn how to do exploit the internet.
Distributor: It's not just a matter of printing, binding, and shipping the books out. Books don't just live in bookstores, anymore. Smashwords is an online retailer that will sell you an eBook in a variety of formats (HTML, .mobi, Epub, PDF, RTF, LRF, PDB, and even plain text!). Amazon will sell you a Kindle file or a printed-on-demand copy. Lulu will likewise sell you a printed-on-demand hardcopy. Apple and Nook have their own digital retailers. And those are just the services I personally encountered! Now, how many of you would be surprised to learn that every single one of these services requires a differently formatted file to be submitted to them? If you're at all familiar with technology these days, I bet you're not surprised at all. I think that having a "Distributor" who is responsible for making up all these different files, keeping them in-sync with late-stage changes, making regular backups, and other techie grunt-work would be a big boon to the project.
Now, reading over these roles, how many do you think can be done by more than one person? I already called out the Writer role, since that's done now. A book may only have one official Editor in the big publishing houses, but it probably has multiple copy-editors, not to mention each author's agent acting as a preliminary editor. As for the Cover Artist, couldn't a couple of people collaborate on that, and maybe even use an idea from one of the non-artists in the group? You could easily have a pair of Promoters, and the entire team would be expected to contribute to the official blog. And who couldn't help with the Distributor role? One person can handle the formatting, another the regular backups, and so on.
Of course, these roles could be done by a single person. In fact, it's happening today. It depends on the nature of the project, the time frame, and whatever issues pop up thanks to that crazy thing we call life. But what I'm trying to do is shrink the entire publishing process down to a single team that leverages the glory of the internet and a lot of flexibility to easily take a book from start to finish.
Linking things back to the Agile process, you'd start with the two main "features" of the project: the book itself, and then the publishing work. Those would each be broken down. The book would probably be broken down into chapters, and then those broken down into scenes, and it would be the scenes that are assigned to a specific Writer and Editor. The Editors who do the scene-by-scene development probably wouldn't be the same people who edit the finished revisions. While this is going on, you'd also work on Promotional tasks ("Write a blog post describing the setting and some of the world-building to get people interested"). Of course, the Writers are doing the bulk of the work, and you don't necessarily want a half dozen or more writers dividing up a book between them. Two primary writers are probably what you want the maximum to be, and then only a small percentage of the scenes would be handled by supplementary or specialist writers, such as action scenes. So, this brings to light the idea that some members of the team would be busier than others at various times. What would we do with those other team-members? After all, we want the book credited to the team, and the whole team to be happy with that. So how do would all that time and effort be managed?
Well, why not have the team working on two books at once, with both final novels credited to the team?
The second book would have different primary writers, of course. Heck, all the other primary roles could be mixed up as well.
How fast could a team like this churn out books? Considering how much less effort goes into books, sometimes it seems like movies get made quicker. Wouldn’t it be great to shorten that turnaround time, while maintaining quality and style?
So, do you think something like this could work? What improvements would you suggest?
However, one line of thought especially jumped out at me. On my livejournal, LaLunatique shared a great article that outlined the history of Publishing and the role of the Author in the evolving sales model, ending with the assertion that the changing marketplace (online versus bookstores, grassroots over corporate publishing, etc.) will yield a new manifestation of the old concept of an Author. The article can be read here, and I recommend it as much for its exciting and punchy style as for the learning opportunity it offers. The article really got me thinking and one idea especially won my infatuation:
What if the next evolution of the Author is from a single, credited person to a team of interchangeable people?
The strengths of this are obvious. You can get great idea people, great writers, great communicators, great editors, and great promoters all put together in a team dedicated to creating the best book they can. The main focus of the team would be on producing something that is simultaneously art and entertainment. (With more emphasis on the entertainment than the art, if there's a conflict between the two.) Naturally, the normal rules about teams need to be applied. Everyone has to get along, believe in the end goal, be able to work effectively together, and so on. Preferably, there would be a "manager" instead of a "leader," a person who takes point on organizing and troubleshooting instead of making decisions for the rest of the group, but every team has its own optimally functional culture.
Before everyone protests this idea, LaLunatique provided an example of this type of thing in action already. Anyone heard of the group of manga producers called CLAMP? If not, Wikipedia has a short description of their collaborative work process here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clamp_(manga_artists)#Business_model It seems they've managed to achieve some level of success. A similar example outside of the writing/art industries is Valve, a computer game company that does all their own development and publishing without leaders or major public figures, and is known as a strong brand that produces reliably good video games.
In my own day job as a web developer for a large corporation, I've had years of experience with a team model. We use a software development method known as "Agile Development," which is geared towards producing quality product with low turnaround time using a collaborative approach. My own company doesn't exactly use a pure version of this, but the strength of Agile is that it's very flexible, and every company can implement a flavor that works best for them. The basic idea is that you take a final product, and break it up into 'features,' which are then broken up into smaller tasks that can be completed in several days. Over a period of two to three weeks, the team works together to implement a set of features, with the idea that at the end of the working period, the group will have a minimally functional software that can be used as the base for the next set of features. The people on the team can have specialties (User Interface developer, Requirements writer, Tester, and many possible others) but the central idea to Agile Development is that the entire team can 'swarm' on a task or feature that needs to be completed quickly. For example, if you're coming up on the end of the working period and a lot of stuff still needs to be tested, everyone drops what they're doing and becomes a Tester.
Of course, Agile Development has its own challenges, but what methodology doesn't? Being very familiar with it, I got to thinking about how a similar system might be used to collaboratively produce a novel.
First, let's set our goal: to produce, publish, and sell a novel without a major publishing house being involved.
Now, what will we need to accomplish this?
Writer(s)
Editor(s)
Cover Artist
Promoter(s)
Distributor
Writer: This one is fairly obvious. A writer is someone who creates the words of the actual story. Even now, writers can collaborate on a single book, but in my idea for a team approach, this could be extended beyond that. Perhaps there are two 'primary' writers on a book assignment, but then you have other secondary writers who handle special assignments like action scenes or dialogue-heavy scenes, or even just contribute a few passages here because they have a good idea for the presentation. They would work from a full outline of the plot, and perhaps each chapter could be a single assignment.
Editor: There are different kinds of editors. The kind most of us are familiar with are "copy editors," the people who proofread and point out spelling errors, typos, grammar problems, and so on. Yes, this is a separate job in today's world. "Pure" editors are becoming endangered, and are the people who read your book and then send it back talking about how your story lacks focus, the main character's arc was unintentionally subverted by the events of chapter 24, and you could strengthen the narrative by streamlining that sequence there about two-thirds of the way through the book. Ideally, the person providing this kind of editing is not also a writer on the book. These days, the author's agent is expected to perform this kind of duty to save the publisher time and money.
Cover Artist: The person who makes the cover! They can paint a masterpiece showing an epic battle between a knight and a dragon, or simply put the title of the book in fancy letters on top of a green box for a minimalist effect. This person isn't just someone who can draw or photoshop, but someone who understands how to sell the book with a single image and make it stand out on the bookshelves or the Amazon results list or whatever.
Promoter: It used to be that this was the job of the big publishing house (aside from the binding and printing process, which are now available to everyone and their dog at a good price). Writers, by definition, should be able to communicate ideas to lots of people, but the sad fact is that a lot of the people writing sci-fi and fantasy books are really lousy salespeople. The publishers would organize ad campaigns, signings, arrange for prominent placement in the best bookstores, line up reviews from prominent figures, and lots of other interesting stuff. Now that we have this thing called the internet, though, publishers expect authors to do more of their own promotion via Facebook and blogs and other such venues. A dedicated promoter would make this their primary concern, buying ads on websites, organizing the team's blog, running contests on the team's Facebook page, and other such activities. This is a fact of the publishing world now, and it strikes me that having a dedicated expert is better than making a writer with no talent for it learn how to do exploit the internet.
Distributor: It's not just a matter of printing, binding, and shipping the books out. Books don't just live in bookstores, anymore. Smashwords is an online retailer that will sell you an eBook in a variety of formats (HTML, .mobi, Epub, PDF, RTF, LRF, PDB, and even plain text!). Amazon will sell you a Kindle file or a printed-on-demand copy. Lulu will likewise sell you a printed-on-demand hardcopy. Apple and Nook have their own digital retailers. And those are just the services I personally encountered! Now, how many of you would be surprised to learn that every single one of these services requires a differently formatted file to be submitted to them? If you're at all familiar with technology these days, I bet you're not surprised at all. I think that having a "Distributor" who is responsible for making up all these different files, keeping them in-sync with late-stage changes, making regular backups, and other techie grunt-work would be a big boon to the project.
Now, reading over these roles, how many do you think can be done by more than one person? I already called out the Writer role, since that's done now. A book may only have one official Editor in the big publishing houses, but it probably has multiple copy-editors, not to mention each author's agent acting as a preliminary editor. As for the Cover Artist, couldn't a couple of people collaborate on that, and maybe even use an idea from one of the non-artists in the group? You could easily have a pair of Promoters, and the entire team would be expected to contribute to the official blog. And who couldn't help with the Distributor role? One person can handle the formatting, another the regular backups, and so on.
Of course, these roles could be done by a single person. In fact, it's happening today. It depends on the nature of the project, the time frame, and whatever issues pop up thanks to that crazy thing we call life. But what I'm trying to do is shrink the entire publishing process down to a single team that leverages the glory of the internet and a lot of flexibility to easily take a book from start to finish.
Linking things back to the Agile process, you'd start with the two main "features" of the project: the book itself, and then the publishing work. Those would each be broken down. The book would probably be broken down into chapters, and then those broken down into scenes, and it would be the scenes that are assigned to a specific Writer and Editor. The Editors who do the scene-by-scene development probably wouldn't be the same people who edit the finished revisions. While this is going on, you'd also work on Promotional tasks ("Write a blog post describing the setting and some of the world-building to get people interested"). Of course, the Writers are doing the bulk of the work, and you don't necessarily want a half dozen or more writers dividing up a book between them. Two primary writers are probably what you want the maximum to be, and then only a small percentage of the scenes would be handled by supplementary or specialist writers, such as action scenes. So, this brings to light the idea that some members of the team would be busier than others at various times. What would we do with those other team-members? After all, we want the book credited to the team, and the whole team to be happy with that. So how do would all that time and effort be managed?
Well, why not have the team working on two books at once, with both final novels credited to the team?
The second book would have different primary writers, of course. Heck, all the other primary roles could be mixed up as well.
How fast could a team like this churn out books? Considering how much less effort goes into books, sometimes it seems like movies get made quicker. Wouldn’t it be great to shorten that turnaround time, while maintaining quality and style?
So, do you think something like this could work? What improvements would you suggest?