Was This the First CC Community-Edited Novel?

Odinson writes "In late 2005 I released a draft of a science fiction novel under the by-nc-nd CC license. I started accepting edits in the hope of polishing a manuscript for submission to a publisher. A publisher never materialized, but after thousands of comments the draft started getting really solid. So a couple of months ago I decided to buy an ISBN and sell hard copies from Lulu. While doing research for a press release, I was unable to uncover the first community-edited, CC-licensed work of fiction. I strongly suspect that my novel is the first. Can anybody point to a prior example? How about under other licenses? If someone has traveled this road before, I'd like to ask them how it went. I would also like to vet this question here before staking a claim to be the first."

Comments

Fanfic

[Anonymous Coward]

There certainly existed community-edited novel-length fanfiction before 2005, although I don't know if you would count them as "real" novels.

Also the license terms for fanfiction are generally rather murky :)

Peter Watts

[pionzypher]

The Rifter series was released circa 2001 or so and is available at rifters.com for free under a CC licence IIRC. However, I'm fairly sure Watts used a publisher for the back end stuff.

Congrats, and thank you for looking to publish in this manner.

Re:Peter Watts

[bcrowell]

There are quite a few professional authors releasing fiction under some kind of CC license. Cory Doctorow, Rudy Rucker, Karl Schroeder, Peter Watts, and Charles Stross are some of the better known SF pros who are doing this. Bruce Sterling has released some nonfiction under a CC license. Other, less well known professionally published authors are trying it as well, e.g., Rick Dakan, Mike Brotherton, Jim Munroe.

I'm not sure what's so notable about the "community-edited" part. It sounds like an attempt to make a false analogy between fiction writing and software development. Software is a tool, so the "with enough eyeballs, all bugs become shallow" concept makes sense; if it's broken, people can help you fix it. Fiction isn't a tool. The difference between a good novel and a bad novel isn't just that there are typos here and there. There's also a massive oversupply of people who think they can write fiction, so it's not exactly exciting news that someone is willing to give me his novel for free. Slush pile editors get paid to read unpublished fiction all day, and at night they go home bleary-eyed and debating whether to slit their wrists.

One similarity that does exist between fiction writing and software hacking is that they both require a large amount of practice to get good at. I collected about forty rejection slips on about a dozen pieces of short fiction before making my first sale. If the OP really wants to get to the point where he can reach an audience with his science fiction, I'd advise him to look into some online groups where he can get feedback on his work. Two good communities are critters.org and the Baen's Universe e-slush board. I also benefited a lot from attending one of the Clarion workshops.

I think the analogy with open-source software works much better for nonfiction, and it's also with nonfiction that you can actually hope to reach a significant audience without going through a traditional publisher.

Re:by-nc-nd? Community edited?

[WWWWolf]

How can a community edited work be published under by-nc-ND?

With the permission from the community in question. You need to make distinction between creators of the work and the public that uses and distributes the work. One would assume that if they get contributors aboard, each of them will understand what they're going to do with the work, right?

Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning was released under BY-NC-ND, and was definitely a "community work" in every sense of the expression. It's also sold on DVD, for profit - by the creators. -NC just means you aren't allowed to make a copy and then sell it yourself.

BitTorrent download

[TheSHAD0W]

http://bittornado.com/torrents/Thicker-Than-Blood.pdf.torrent

Sorry about the off-topic reply, just trying to help people w/ their slow download.

Re:First by-nc-nd CC post!

[sapphire wyvern]

Er, Monty Python wasn't a person. They were a comedy troupe.

Re:by-nc-nd? Community edited?

[Markusis]

I am one of the community editors for this book. My name is listed in the acknowledgments.

First let me say that the book is awesome. It's got a great plot, great characters, and it pulls you in. A few times I was late to work by a few minutes because I just couldn't put the book down until I finished the chapter I was reading. I highly recommend it.

Now, let me explain how I helped edit the book. I can't speak for the other editors, but this is how I got involved. I decided I was going to read the book, so I downloaded it and started reading. I find that I'm pretty good at finding typos and grammatical errors in books. I find them in books that are published by the big publishers & authors all the time. I usually find at least one or two mistakes in every book I read. When I was reading thicker than blood I just started keeping track of everything that I knew was misspelled or grammatically incorrect and everything that I was unsure of as well. When I had finished the book I found that I had nearly 200 edits, so I sent them over to the author. He was very grateful and a few months later he sent me a printed copy of his book.

So, the 'nd' doesn't really apply because I never made a derivative work, I just sent him a patch that was human-readable-only. The changes that I made are so small that copyright doesn't apply to my changes. I mean, I would assign him the copyright if it did matter, but such a small change would not trigger copyright. If I had rewritten a few paragraphs or added any real substance it may have, but fixing typos and making sure apostrophes are placed correctly does not deserve any attention from copyright. These are the contributions that I made and I can not speak for other editors.

Again, I can't recommend the book enough. I can't wait for the sequel.

Mark Drago.

Re:by-nc-nd? Community edited?

[Odinson]

The book was posted by me.

The book was released under that license from the start. I was originally planning on getting it published by a traditional (see fearful) publisher and didn't want to do anything to risk a potential deal. I just couldn't stand the thought of someone buying it and sitting on it. (Which happens all the time)

I the complete draft. A dozen people submitting edits on their own. Some of the contributions just emails with lists of hundreds of edits per post. None of which where solicited beyond 'if you find any errors' It *WAS NOT* the original plan to have this book be community edited.

BTW I can count the number of books I have sold on my fingers and toes. I just put it up on Lulu and bought an ISBN. When I realized the CC+CE+fiction+novel might be the case I tried to verify it and could not get a affirmative response from CC community list or many people I emailed. Only a group this large could have affirmed this.