Categories: Articles

Publishing House Penguin Launches A Wiki Novel

You know I love books. You know I love technology. You know my passion for social media. When I saw this news release from Reuters: Publisher Launches Its First “Wiki” Novel (hat tip to MarketingVox), I got all excited.
“‘This is an experiment. It may end up like reading a bowl of alphabet spaghetti,’ Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin UK said, adding there were no plans as yet to publish the completed work… ‘I’ll be happy so long as it manages to avoid becoming some sort of robotic-zombie-assassins-against-African-ninjas-in-space-narrated-by-a-Papal-Tiara type of thing.'”
You can check out the wiki novel, amillionpenguins.com, here: PenguinWiki – A Million Penguins.
This sounds way too much like a PR play than a calculated strategy to see if a bunch of people can write, edit and produce a sensible novel. Something is not sitting right with me and this concept.
I’m guessing that the better books out there start with the end in mind and the author (or authors) is (are) able to construct a vision of how to get there through story and character development. The amillionpenguins.com reminds me more of that game we would play in sleepaway camp where someone starts a sentence and the next person must continue the story. There’s never much rhyme or reason.
So here I sit, grappling with my thoughts. On one hand, I can’t imagine anything of substantive quality coming out of the wiki. On the other hand, I want to applaud Penguin Publishing for leveraging a wiki to see what kind of literature the wisdom of crowds can publish.

Mitch Joel

Mitch Joel lives at the intersection of technology, business transformation and consumer culture. He is the Executive Director of Next Era Institute, a strategic intelligence platform helping leaders understand the forces reshaping business, technology, culture and society. The Institute identifies which shifts matter, explores their wider significance and translates them into strategic direction and momentum. Mitch is also a globally recognized keynote speaker. He has delivered thousands of presentations across both B2B and B2C industries to organizations including Google, Walmart, LEGO, Shopify, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble and Unilever. Strategy Magazine has called him “one of North America’s leading visionaries.” Mitch built his career by working directly inside the waves of change that reshaped modern business. He founded and built a digital marketing agency that worked with some of the world’s largest brands and was later acquired by WPP, where he served as President of a firm operating in 25 countries with almost 3,000 employees. Mitch is the bestselling author of Six Pixels of Separation and CTRL ALT Delete, and the host of Thinking With Mitch Joel, one of the longest-running business podcasts in the world. His writing and commentary appear in outlets including Harvard Business Review, Fast Company and Inc. Magazine. He is a member of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and was named to the Thinkers50 Radar. Mitch also hosts Groove – The No Treble Podcast, documenting the oral history of electric bass players. Mitch is also Co-Founder of ThinkersOne, a platform that enables companies to bring personalized thought leadership from world-class experts into meetings, events and off-sites in focused 15-minute bursts.