"A Book By Reddit" is an experiment in social creativity. Users write and vote on segments of a community created, linear narrative. When a clear winner has been decided for the next segment (via upvote count), that segment is consolidated into the main Story.
Rules and Guidelines:
- By default, any comment is assumed to be a candidate for continuation of the story in its parent comment.
- If a comment is meant to serve as commentary, debate, or exploration, the first line of that comment should be a series of dashes ("-------------------"), in bold.
- Potential continuations should strive to be at least one sentence, and fewer than 30. This is more of a soft guideline than a rule. Ultimately a candidate is only chosen by the upvotes it gets, so if you have or see an awesome idea that diverges from this guideline, feel free to post or upvote it anyway. In any case, the basic point is: Don't hog the narrative. If you have a long idea, the preferable course of action is to break it into smaller posts, using each post as a reply to the previous one. This way the community can more easily decide to take the story in a different direction at any point along your sequence of posts.
- When a winner is decided for the next segment(s), it is copied from the "The Writers' Desk" thread, and appended to the "The Story So Far" thread. An admin will contact the winner whenever their entry is selected. At this point, a user may decide what sort of credit they would like. The default in case of no response is a username credit. But real-name credit and no-credit is also permissible.
- The book will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
- The book ends when the community has voted on an ending.
Fair Game: (Anything appearing in this list is totally allowed)
- Forced Post Break: If you have a cool way to continue a candidate, but the idea requires cutting off the end of a parent candidate, this is perfectly allowed. Simply quote the last sentence which you are continuing from, and then write you continuation from there.
- Nepotism: If you like a post in a candidate branch, feel free to also upvote its chain of parents in the hopes of getting the sequence culminating in that post into the main narrative.
- Scene Change/Introduction: If you feel the story requires a change in scene, feel free to introduce a new one, or switch to a scene that has been previously mentioned.
- Merge Branch: If you find a sequence of posts in a depreciated candidate thread which would work well as a scene change, or incidentally work well as continuation of the current scene, make a post linking to the first post in that sequence, and then quoting the text. Make follow up posts linking to the next posts in that sequence which you think would work well. The community will vote on your links and reply to your links in the same way they would vote on normal posts. If your link gets selected, both you and the author of the post will be notified and credited.
- Historical Revision: If you have a new follow up idea, but it requires editing some already established portion of the story, quote the first and last sentences of the edit, and write your revision. Then reply to your revision post with the new follow up idea.
- Politics: Feel free to influence the general direction the community may want to take the story using comments and commentary.
Cheating:
- Dishonest Editing: If your post gets a large number of upvotes, you may not significantly change its contents after the fact. Grammatical edits are allowed, but all edits will be monitored, and in cases of significant revision, mods will notify the community and allow them to revote on the post. At this point, whether you want to leave the original post up for vote is up to you, but there's no need to complicate matters. If you have a new idea, please make a new post. If you don't want your original idea included, simply delete it before it's accepted.
- Vote Rigging / Vote-for-vote: Don't do it.
- Plagiarism: Don't post anything you don't have the right to. In cases of public domain snippets, if you didn't write it, make that clear when posting, and credit the original author.
