Penguin UK, the publishing house, is launching a special project. It’s a novel, called A Million Penguins, open for anyone to write and edit, online as a wiki. They claim it’s the first time a major publishing house are doing this kind of thing.
Over the next six weeks we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel. We honestly don’t know how this is going to turn out – it’s an experiment. Some disciplines rely completely on collaboration, while others – the writing of a novel, for example – have traditionally been the work of an individual working in isolation.
To kickstart things, Penguin have hired some MA students to get the ball rolling. That seem to have worked (or they have really crappy servers) since the site is loading poorly due to heavy load on the wiki.
Read more over at the Penguin blog, the A Million Penguins blog and check out the project itself. If you can get to it, that is. The project is only open during February, and might or might not end up in a printed book. It all depends on how it turns out, of course.
Originally posted on February 2, 2007 @ 4:07 am