WEbook Launches Collaborative Book-Writing Site

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 4/4/2008 9:54:00 AM

A new Internet start-up is hoping to do for novel writing what American Idol did for music and what Wikipedia did for information. The online platform WEbook launches today, and will attempt to lure authors, editors and writing groups to collaboratively create written works, and vote on which ones should be published. WEbook takes community-sourced content and publishes it in a range of formats, including e-books and paperbacks. The company is backed by Greylock Partners Israel and a number of individual investors. 

WEbook recruited members for its alpha testing phase in August, culling MFAs and writers who’d had some publishing success. There are now 750 members and membership is free. Within the site, there are dozens of (mostly nonfiction) subject areas where members can start writing. Members can designate their work as “private,” which allows them to keep the rights and share it only with their friends, or make it “public,” which is where WEbook makes its money: if a book garners enough votes from the WEbook community, WEbook copyedits, typesets and publishes the book, giving the author and contributors a 5% royalty on sales. President Sue Heilbronner mentioned the possibility of secondary revenue streams deriving from a marketplace to connect writers with agents.

WEbook’s first book was published this month: Pandora, a thriller novel with 17 authors. The book is available in paperback for $13.99 and an e-book for $9.99 and is sold on WEbook’s site and Amazon, where it is printed as POD, via BookSurge. The first four chapters are available free via mobile phone by texting “WEbook” to 41411or by visiting the site from any web-enabled mobile device.

WEbook has 11 employees and is based in Bethesda, Md., with a development team in Mountain View, Calif.