Molly Barton is president of Book Country, an online community for genre fiction writers, and VP of Digital Publishing, Business Development and Strategy at Penguin Group (USA).  Stories are the foundation of human communication, even when first relayed over campfires — an inherently social and communal setting. The storyteller can change his tale based on the expressions on the faces of his audience — speed up here, slow down there, give more background on a character. The storyteller may hear someone else retell his or her own story in a different way, and use that experience in telling new stories or iterating upon the original. The story gets stronger and more nuanced in the retelling.  In the modern world of broadcast and publisher media, the traditional model relies on a series of individuals reading and choosing which stories will appeal to broad audiences. These gatekeepers evaluate commercial and literary potential based on books that have previously succeeded. Daring stories that push boundaries and bend categories may be passed over because they are more difficult to market. But the tastes of readers and viewers often progresses more quickly than the stories readily available to them reflect.  But what if we created lots of little fires around which writers could tell their stories and gauge the reaction of a keen audience, improving their storytelling before bumping up against the traditional media filter? Would we get more interesting stories? Could we uncover a new group of brilliant creators who might not have connections to those gatekeepers?  Crowdsourcing fundamentally alters the process of content selection — and by extension, storytelling itself — by bringing authors and readers (and, potentially, viewers) closer to the acquisition process. If viewers and readers are given a structured, fun way to give feedback on cutting edge stories, stories that might have been passed over before, these tales have a better chance of gaining the attention of editors and producers who have the funds to bring them to a broad audience.  Having positive reviews and interest from readers pre-publication will help push the boundaries of what a curator in a big company will be willing to consider. This happens in academic publishing with blind peer reviews, but has not been applied to trade publishing. Birthing stories in this context means that writers who’ve been through the peer review process approach the traditional media filter surrounded by a community of supporters who can help their story successfully launch into the crowded media landscape.  This is more than just crowdsourcing. It’s the advancement of the structure of media — broadening the gates, making the gates smarter and more sophisticated so that storytelling innovation is accelerated. Audiences are broader than ever because the people creating the stories are from a broader geographic and socioeconomic cultural swath.  This new model will deliver writers from beyond the traditional media epicenters of New York, Los Angeles and London, and give storytellers from Omaha, Neb., to Oswestry, England, access to previously inaccessible workshopping and publication resources.  When Neuromancer was published in 1984, the genre called “cyberpunk” did not exist. Until Michael Crichton introduced us to The Andromeda Strain in 1969, the “environmental thriller” was but a category of stories waiting to be told. By expanding the process through which stories are found, we give those who are passionate about new kinds of stories the opportunity to influence, and in so doing, increase the likelihood that new genres and sub-genres of stories will develop and find eager waiting audiences.  As self-produced content (whether that be a homemade YouTube music video or self-published book) becomes increasingly popular, many have expressed concern that the quality of the stories will suffer. Here, too, a well-organized crowdsourced model offers a viable solution. Identifying compelling stories is not a numerical game; basing success solely on the number of “thumbs up” votes has not worked and frustrated those who tell stories as well as those who read them. Moving this to a qualitative model — one in which readers offer feedback to storytellers to help them hone their tales and editors rely on substantive feedback to identify stories that appeal to audiences — creates a path for new stories to be noticed.  Online, stories don’t have to be “mainstream” to succeed. They find their way to the right readers and viewers without debuting on thousands of big screens in one weekend. Storytelling of the future will be targeted to audiences that have a clear and expressed interest in that particular sort of content. Writers will continue to become more keenly aware of the depths of their chosen niche as they become as accurate as possible about whom they’re writing for and how to reach those people.  Image courtesy of iStockphoto, AnthiaCumming
The traditional media model of gatekeepers is slowly giving way to niche communities that source and inform the creative process. The new era of storytelling is upon us, thanks in large part to the social web.