On Friday, an unlikely book will break the all-time record for Kickstarter’s most successful publishing project: a comedic choose-your-own-adventure-style novel by popular webcartoonist Ryan North that transforms Shakespeare’s Hamlet into an interactive story where readers can actually choose whether to be — or not to be. It’s a quirky idea that couldn’t get any traction at book publishing houses, but as a crowdsourced, collaborative online project, To Be or Not to Be: That Is the Adventure has earned over $425,000 in less than a month.
The book, which allows readers to either pick the canonical path of the play or diverge into hilarious alternate-universe timelines, isn’t just a wish-fulfillment exercise for every student who shouted, “Just kill the King already, Hamlet!” It’s also a demonstration of the power of new media, and how internet curation and collaboration can turn small ideas into successful projects that would never be possible through traditional publishing channels.
“On the original Kickstarter page I said, ‘You are going to decide how awesome this book is going to be!’ and it happened surprisingly quickly,” says North, best known as the creator of Dinosaur Comics. “No [publisher] would drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on getting this book made because you don’t know if the audience will show up for it, and you have to front all these costs. The better you want to make the book, the riskier it gets. But with Kickstarter, we know the audience is there when we make these decisions.”
