The good folks at Book Oven are among those trying to figure out what “writing” and “books” mean in the twenty-first century. (The link takes you to the site’s home page; once there, you can check out their blog, twitter link, etc.)
Among their other projects, they’ve created a site called Bite-Size Edits, where control freaks like me can throw caution to the wind and let you, the reader, help write/edit our books.
(Yes, I am a control freak. The very idea of turning my text loose, unedited, unfinished, unpolished is unnerving. But what’s life for but to learn and grow?) So you are hereby invited to join the process.
It works like this: I post some text at the Bite-Size site. The site software spits it back out in small chunks (bytes/bites. Get it?) and you have at it. So go! Have fun! Here’s the link
You SERIOUSLY drank the kool-aid!!! However, I do have a question about this. Does putting your work on a site like Book Oven infringe in any way on the rights the publisher purchased when they gave you the contract? I have read on the internet (so therefore it must be true) that putting work online constitutes “publishing” and may impact the print publication in some way. Can you illuminate?
That was the very first question/notion that came to mind when I was invited to participate. The short answer is that I’m not sure yet about the legalities, but it seems to me that there are/should be some legal issues.So I plan to ask my editor if it’s okay to do this. But I went ahead and entered the 200 or so words of text that I did because a) I doubt such a short amount of text would violate any legal contract; b) the text is broken up into small chunks and no one reader sees all of it; and c) therefore I rather doubt it’s any different that passing a manuscript around, say, a writing/critique group.Because that is, in effect, what writers do when they participate in writing groups: read each other’s drafts and work-in-progress, and no one thinks that’s illegal. Obviously the difference here is that I posted the text on a semi-public forum and invited a random group of people to edit it.But the question you asked is definitely the question that ought to be asked and one that I’ll get an answer to.
Hi Maureen, Thanks so much for being part of our vanguard of testers! … On the copyright/publishing issue: no one editor sees the work in order, nor do they see all the work. So – while it has yet to be tested in court! – I think it would be impossible to call something in Bite-Size Edits “published” … some very fragmentary bits of it have been published, but not the whole thing. Also worth noting, once it is edited, it disappears from the system (you’ll have the option, later, to leave it up if you like)… so it is but fleeting, random bits of text that are available to the world…But once again: thanks for participating; and note: I am very curious to read you book now