It has all the trimmings of an online event: there are RSS feeds, weekly podcasts and clever widgets that predict your average work rate! But the National Novel Writing Month competition, which invites budding writers to put together a novel of 50,000 words in less than a month, still has an old-fashioned novel-writing essential at the heart of it: you still have to actually write the thing. Set aside the wired-up community aspects and you find that both the process (garret, candles, beret, solid typing speed, mediations on a broken heart or leg or tap) and products (novels) of "NaNoWriMo" are straightforward and traditional.
Even with those NaNo books good enough to get published, for the most part the story of their construction remains invisible and irrelevant to the reader. The publisher might mention its NaNo origins if it'll drum-up interest in the press, but to the reader browsing in a bookshop it's just like any other book. It still has the title and author's name on both cover and spine, both of which still sport a market-oriented design, and there is still a wodge of enthusiastic purse-opening bumph on the back of the jacket. It's still just one book among many.
There is, however, some genuine innovation going on elsewhere on the net. Over at the wonderfully-titled Institute for the Future of the Book they are experimenting with what they call "networked books". There are two current projects. The first is a blog-format book about atheism. The second, more elegantly designed, is a mediation on gaming culture.
With both projects the idea is that the author presents his drafted work in an online environment built to facilitate reader comments. With the gamer theory book you can quickly and easily comment on each individual paragraph. Eventually these books will end up as standard paper-based publications, but before they go to print the authors are able to interact with readers and, through debating points, arguing over facts and being introduced to new ideas, improve their books before version one hits the bookshops. The collective wisdom of their online readership is cycled back into the text, improving the book. (Although "readers" becomes an inadequate term, as they are active participants in the book's creation and are credited for their major contributions.)
So long as the author cares to maintain this dialogue, different versions of the book evolve online month-by-month. April 2007 will see a new "print release" of the "GAM3R 7H30RY" book, to give it its proper l33t-speak title but there's nothing to stop this book developing across a lifespan of years. Decades even, if the author and community both persevere.
It strikes me that the "networked book" owes a lot to Wikipedia culture, wherein unpaid users make valued contributions to non-fiction texts for the pleasure of helping out, sharing their expertise and improving the work's integrity. Both of the Institute's networked books are works of non-fiction and are clearly benefiting from having smart readers interrogate everything from the author's basic assumptions to tiny points of interpretation.
But how might this work for fiction? Would Ian McEwan have written a better novel had his readers been given the chance to persuade him, in the form of public commentary, page-by-page, that the opening chapters of Enduring Love deserved a better ending? Might Dickens have responded to calls to save Little Nell and redrafted to please his readers and open up room for a sequel?
Might authors benefit from this kind of close contact with readers during the drafting of their work? Or are novels best left alone as solitary acts of creation, delivered by the author to the reader before criticism and dissent causes them to meddle with their own stories?