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

First community driven book?

[stpk4]

Wouldn't that be the Bible? = )

Re:Cheap publicity.

[makkverk]

This novel was originally posted online as a rough draft in late 2005. It has made great strides, receiving tens of thousands of reader contributions. It has received good reader reviews, and has been downloaded 6000 times in a two year span.

So, do the people that helped you get a cut of the $12.95?

No, but under the CC lisence they're all allowed to print and sell the book themselves.

Re:Cheap publicity.

[Odinson]

My cut is $3.30 if it's sold from Lulu, and $.48 cents for books sold from Barnes and Noble. After three two four years of writing, editing, and a month of working the Kinks out of Lulu, I have sold exactly 23 books. Half of those I bought, and mailed to the heavy editors to say thanks. Reviews have been great, so all I can think is people just don't take CC/Lulu authors seriously. Not a good sign for those west coast haters out there.

Since you can download it for free, best I can figure is I really just did this for the Slashdot Karma. :)

Re:Cheap publicity.

[Em Adespoton]

This is exactly the point. Publishing is not being crowdsourced; editing is. The resulting work is publicly available for ANYONE to take and print under their own ISBN; in this case, it is the person who originated the project who decided to monetize it through publication. Hopefully he'll roll the profits back into the site to help foster future such projects -- but that's his choice. He could just as easily pocket the profits. If he does this, the rest of his team is within their rights to fork the project and produce their own in-print copy (with edits if desired).