Dear Hivians,
I had a thought yesterday. I don't know if it's been thought of before or even done already. So excuse me if it has.
The idea is a series of novels in the form of Volumes. Consisting of short stand-alone stories written by the writers of the Hive community. Ranging from about 2000 - 4000 words each.
We have an abundance of writers here on the platform, with varying experience levels. I think it would be amazing to put all of our minds together and group all of our short stories in one book and self publish the content somewhere like amazon for example, or any other publishing platform outside of Hive.
Why?
I think it would be great for us all to get our work out to a larger market and gain some exposure for ourselves as individual writers and it could be a great showcase of what the Hive platform has to offer.
It could help to promote the platform and introduce Hive to people who may have never heard of it before.
I know from my own experience, I stumbled upon the platform by accident and once I got here I was introduced to so many great communities and have read so much great work from a lot of really talented individuals.
Publishing.
If we had enough interest and content for a novel we could come together and set up a proposal to fund the publishing costs of the novel/ novels.
I say novels because I could easily see 2 or 3 volumes worth of content being submitted to this series. Probably, before we get a chance to publish the first book. I could be wrong of course but based on what I've seen in my short time here. I don't think I am.
Experience.
It could be a great opportunity for aspiring authors to get some exposure and some experience in publishing work. I've never published a book, so for myself, it would be good to start the steps towards that. Learning the ins and outs of what goes into doing that.
Problems.
The issue of money could be a problem, but I'm sure we can figure it out. Each novel's earnings could be divided evenly between each author and editor of the novel. Which is the fairest way to distribute any profits I think.
We would need to have some sort of accountant or treasurer in charge of distributing the royalties. I would imagine. They can take all of the cash, buy Hive and bring it back and distribute it to us here to save any hassle.
Screening.
Each submitted short story could be screened by a team of reviewers who could decide on what gets added to each novel.
Also, one story per author, per volume, just to give everyone a fair chance of getting their work in each book.
Genre.
This is an idea I had while writing this post. We could potentially have a spin-off series where each novel is themed. I.E Writers of Hive.io - Thriller, Western, Romance.
So, we start with the main branch which are in the form of Volumes, then do spin-offs down the road that can go out too.
Disclaimers.
If you submitted a romance story to one of the mainline volumes, you can't submit that same story to a potential Romance only spin-off series. Which I think is only fair.
Also, if a piece was reviewed and rejected for whatever reason you're not allowed to re-submit that same story if it hasn't significantly been worked on.
Those would be some examples of rules that would apply to this if we go ahead with it.
Thoughts?
Would anyone be interested in some sort of project like this, I think it could be a really interesting idea to pursue. But, my thoughts mean nothing on a project like this without the whole community coming on board too.
Writer of Hive.io: A short story
Volume 1
By Killerwot
It doesn't have a nice ring to it.
Writers of Hive.io: A collection of short stories
Volume 1
By us
That sounds much better.
Also, just in case anyone was wondering. No. It wouldn't actually say 'By us' on the front cover, it would probably say something like. By The Hive Community. Or something like that.
Each writer would be credited inside the book and have a page each to talk about themselves and give thanks and all that kind of stuff. Just in case anyone was wondering.
That would be the plan anyway, as we would want to sell ourselves as a community, but also credit ourselves as individuals in each of these potential books.
Benefit.
I think apart from potential royalties for each author and apart from being able to promote the creative writing communities here on Hive, and not only drawing in, individual writers out there, who could find a home here on Hive. It's about the experience for each of us here on the platform.
Reviews
Each one of us who submits a piece of work to this project would have some feedback. This would be crucial to our expanded knowledge of writing in general and I think that alone could really help us all.
Afterthought.
One person could potentially write a short story, that could have the potential of being expanded upon into a solo novel or novella, short, film or tv show. Someone could essentially come across a short story in the collection and offer the author of the piece a deal to expand on their original short if it was an interesting premise.
Some feature films for example have been greenlit from just a synopsis alone. I'm not saying that will happen with the work we all put into it and I'm not saying that's what we should strive to do. But, it could potentially happen, if it was a good premise with a compelling character/ characters.
As I said, it's not the reason to do this. It is just an afterthought I had as I was writing this and it is a possibility realistically.
Yet Another After Thought
Sorry, everyone, this is the final thought for this post. So, the idea I came up with right as I finished writing this post is.
Using all of the talented people of Hive we could all get into this, not just the writers. Artists of Hive could create some artwork for the covers.
Any recording artists or Voice Actors out there could maybe even do an audiobook version of the books, then sound designers of Hive could work on background sounds, and Musicians of Hive could work on an ambient soundtrack for the stories.
With an audible version, we could have an audiobook version of each volume go up for sale. Also, we could upload the individual short stories in audio format to 3Speak, YouTube, etc. Which is just another avenue to earn revenue and promote our work as a platform.
It's good, I think. Because we can really showcase the many talents and skills of all the artists here on Hive.
Obviously, our main goal is to get the books out, but down the road, this is where it could lead.
I fully echo @jayna's comments in the original post!
Firstly: anthology is probably the better road to take, not a novel. Not saying you can't try to stitch together a cohesive novel from multiple authors with varying degrees of experience... But it's an order of magnitude more difficult than taking on a single-author novel, which is an order of magnitude more difficult than compiling an anthology. So instead of trying to shoot for the crazy super difficult thing, I'd recommending setting more realistic sights on the "plain ol' difficult" thing 😀
The money thing she mentioned is also spot on. Don't expect to make any sales taking a traditional route. The exception to this is if we can steer the project towards a unique NFT project, where buyers might be interested for reasons other than buying fiction. This (NFTbooks) is something that the Scholar & Scribe community is deeply interested in exploring.
The idea is cool, and the idea is relatively simple. It's the execution that will getcha. Structured incentives—so that people stick with it after the initial "whoah cool new project!"—are critical.