Produsage Book Update

It's been a while since I've posted anything about my produsage book project - the last update I gave simply consisted of some quick stats about the continuing writing process when I was still on sabbatical with the Comparative Media Studies group at MIT in Boston. Back then, for those of you keeping count, I was almost a fortnight into writing the book itself (following months of research and preparation), and had written about 150,000 words; after another few days, the complete first draft of the manuscript weighed in at a slightly frightening 190,000 words - at that time, something of a worry for a book that was contracted to be around 130,000 words or 325 pages.

Working with some excellent advice from the tireless Steve Jones (who edits the Digital Formations series which the book will be part of) and the good folks at Peter Lang, I'm happy to report that I managed cut the text by what's roughly the equivalent of an MA thesis, and have squeezed the manuscript down to around 165,000 words or almost exactly 400 pages. This wasn't the easiest or happiest process (I love writing, but hate editing), but I'm extremely pleased with the final outcome, and comments from those few colleagues who have read the full manuscript as it now stands have been incredibly positive (more on this over the next few weeks). I've now updated the information about the book on this Website, and I've also uploaded the introductory chapter of the book to give you an idea what it's all about. We've settled on the title Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage now, and we're looking to use one of Ann's paintings as the cover image.

Perhaps especially because I've been on sabbatical, lonely, isolated, and away from my loved ones through the process of writing the book, I think I've been much more conscious of the writing process this time around, compared to my first book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (as an edited collection, Uses of Blogs was different). At times it felt like this book would break me; it was always a much more ambitious project than Gatewatching, as it covers so much more terrain than 'only' citizen journalism, and keeping track of all of the detail and of the entire conceptual framework I've been looking to employ in the book has been very difficult - especially since, being on the road, the writing process took place almost entirely without printed notes!

I don't think that I could have done it any other way than by going away and basically living like a hermit for over four months, with few external distractions. It's been reassuring to find that the working style I used for my PhD and the Gatewatching book still works for me, even several years later: the best way for me to complete a project like this is to spend several months, even years, interspersing periods of intense research with some time to let the information ferment, then to spend a few weeks or a month meticulously drawing up outlines of my chapters and their arguments, with relevant quotes from the literature already attached to where I'll use them - and then to plunge headfirst into a period of intense writing activity, which I pretty much don't surface from until the first full draft is complete.

This time, the writing itself took 16 days (one day per chapter, with up to 16 hours of straight writing per day), with only two or three break days interspersed. Almost all of it took place at MIT's Steam Café, where (especially on Sundays and in the last few days of my time there, as the space emptied after the end of MIT's semester) a few people began shooting strange glances at that weird guy sitting in a corner typing furiously. While I'm in the middle of writing, I'm really just spooling through the series of outline notes I've prepared for myself - it's all about braindumping onto the page, with very little additional thinking going on. At the time, what I write usually feels horrible as I stumble from paragraph to paragraph, section to section, and it's only once the whole thing's finished that I can zoom out again to see the big picture and surprise myself by finding that generally the individual pieces do add up to a coherent narrative, that there's meaning to the madness (at least in my mind).

So at this point, with the manuscript now in final proofing, it looks like it's all over bar the shouting for this project. We should have the book out for sale early in 2008 - I'm going to have to think about where and how to launch it... It's been an equally exhausting and exhilarating ride to get to this point, and it will take me some time to recover from all this work. Still, I think the end result is worth it, and I'm delighted with the positive feedback I've received so far - I'm looking forward to spreading the word about the book over the next year. (And yes, I'm starting to develop a few ideas for the next book project.) For now, though, many thanks to everyone who's supported me through the process - now, bring on the summer holidays...

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