A UK publisher's new experiment: crowd-editing

Authors often say the hardest part about writing a book is handing the first draft to their editor, terrified he or she is going to tear it apart. So, is it more or less terrifying if that editor is the world? That's the idea behind Advance Editions, a new UK publishing house that is putting its manuscripts on the Internet to be "crowd-edited," open for suggestions from anyone with an internet connection.

"We continue to pay the professionals to do this job, of course, but there's so much expertise out there than you find within a single publishing company," says Hector Macdonald to As It Happens host Carol Off.

"Thousands and thousands of people are out there writing book blogs, putting out book reviews -- there's a huge amount of energy pouring into assessing and reviewing books. My feeling is, and my colleagues agree, that that kind of energy could be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, if the people who are doing those reviews know that there's a chance that what they say might impact the final shape of the book."

Macdonald points out that constructive criticism -- or even the spotting of crucial errors -- often comes from reader reviews posted on websites. However, at that point it's too late.

"It's very rare for books to get any kind of testing in the way movies have for years," he says. "[With crowd-editing], you get a sense of what people think of a book beforehand."

Here's how it works: Advance Editions posts half of the edited book online a few months ahead of publication and then opens up a feedback forum for that book in which the author participates.

But, what exactly are they looking for in terms of feedback?

"It could be checking facts, it could be bright ideas," he says. "It could be anything, really. Whatever inspires you about the book you're reading."

Authors are not obliged to incorporate any of the feedback, though the most helpful contributors will be credited in the final edition of the respective book.

For crowd-editors who get beyond the first half of the book and want to take on more, they are offered a 60 per cent discount of the complete book at a number of online retailers.

"It's cheaper, but it's not so cheap that it's ridiculous [to writer profitability]," he says.

This approach does make one wonder how authors like Charles Dickens would have taken to a crowd-edit of A Tale of Two Cities, for instance. Like, really, "It was the best of times" and "it was the worst of times"? How is that even possible?

"In that kind of situation, you'd hope Mr. Dickens would have had the courage of his prose to say, 'I'm going to stick with my version,'" laughs Macdonald. "But what might have been useful is when he wrote in the beginning of Great Expectations, about a convict swimming ashore from a prison ship with a huge, great lead weight around his leg. If someone would have pointed out, 'Hey Mr. Dickens, you know, you've written a really fine book here, but it might be a bit more credible if you didn't begin with a completely, physically impossible feat.'"