Building Alexander McCall Smith's Corduroy Mansions

Seven chapters, seven podcasts, 13 character profiles, a Facebook page, a widget and a video tour of Pimlico into the Telegraph's online novel and I feel it's time to take stock.

For the uninitiated, we began publishing Alexander McCall Smith's new novel, Corduroy Mansions, last Monday. He's writing it as he goes along, so a new episode and audio version (read by the mellifluous Andrew Sachs) goes live every weekday.

The author has said the experience makes him feel like a ‘man on a tight rope'. It's been pretty hair-raising for us, too.

Despite months of meetings, it was only a few weeks before launch that the full implications of publishing in this way really sank in.

The daily podcasts will be turned into an audiobook by Little, Brown next year without any anticipated re-recordings, so we're committing ourselves to turning out a final, edited version of Corduroy Mansions to rolling deadlines. We quickly arranged a loop so that the chapters pass through editors at Little, Brown, and the recording studio, before ending up with the online arts team here.

Even for an author accustomed to tight deadlines (if not quite tight ropes) this is a challenge. McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street books may have been serialised in the Scotsman, but without an audio version running alongside simultaneously there was at least more potential leeway for editing before the final version came out.

For his non-serial books, the slickest handling still involves an interim of a couple of months between manuscript and publication. His latest, La's Orchestra Saves the World, took over a year to gestate from an idea to a novel, which he finished in summer. The traditional editorial and production processes kick in at that stage, but the novel will not be released to the public until November.

Still, the challenge has been taken, and we are all afloat, like Noah in his arc, with William French, Berthea Snark, the terrier Freddie de la Hay, et al, until the flood recedes and the series ends next February.

So far we're all delighted with the response, and not just in brute terms of statistics. There's a feeling that the venture is fostering an international community of readers, who write in from Australia or Africa to suggest that Corduroy Mansions needs a cat, or that Bruce, malevolent poseur of Scotland Street, should make an appearance in Pimlico.

"This is a wonderful treat which will transport me from the stark bleached out streets of Riyadh back to London for some minutes every day," writes ‘ABB'. Meanwhile, dedicated creative writers have taken up our challenge to write their own online serial fiction on My Telegraph.

I like to think of Corduroy Mansions as a microcosm of what the internet is doing for lovers of literature as a whole: connecting people divided by geography, allowing them to share their interests and exchange ideas.

Readers have described McCall Smith as a ‘Dickens for the digital age', and it's true that Corduroy Mansions represents a natural continuity of the serial genre. But this shouldn't obscure the novelty of what's on offer.

Did Little Nell have a clickable character profile, I ask you? If you missed the first 6 episodes of The Old Curiosity Shop, could you find them all within a few seconds and reread them at your leisure?

At a time when everyone frets that Google is eroding our attention spans and the internet withering our souls, it's nice to be involved in a project that's building up an entire fictional edifice, brick by brick.

Read Ceri's blog on Telegraph.co.uk

Posted 24/09/2008 15:09:00 by Ceri Radford, Deputy Communities Editor, Telegraph.co.uk with 1 comments.