Neil Gaiman's new fiction project

Blackberry recently approached Neil Gaiman to participate in a project they call "Keep Moving," which is engaging artists to produce works in collaboration with their fans on the Internet. (Musician Alicia Keys and filmmaker Robert Rodriguez are also running their own Keep Moving projects.)

Gaiman created 12 writing prompts, one for each month of the year ("Why is January so dangerous," etc), and posed them as questions to his Twitter followers. Fans replied with their answers, Gaiman picked his favorites, and used them to create 12 miniature stories.

The 12 stories are now available online for fans to read. In the next stage, artists are invited to submit illustrations for the stories. Gaiman will choose his favorites, to be gathered in a collection which will be available as both a digital and a limited-edition physical printing.

This project is certainly an interesting way to use Twitter and engage your fan base. But I have some reservations about the compensation situation. No mention has been made of compensation, for either the words or the pictures.

It's one thing to help out a favorite artist in exchange for a thank you and a bit of recognition. I note with approval that Gaiman prefaces each story with both the Twitter handle of the person whose prompt he chose, and the full text of that prompt. For a lot of fans, that kind of recognition from such a massive star would put them over the moon. (Gaiman once replied to one of my tweets, and I was pretty thrilled. I can only imagine how exciting it would be to have your tweets immortalized in this collection.)

But let's keep things in perspective. This isn't a Neil Gaiman project, it's a Blackberry project. Blackberry is holding the purse strings, and Blackberry is the entity that's asking for you to submit your words and illustrations to their project. If Blackberry doesn't want to get involved in compensating random Internet people for their contributions, couldn't they at least kick some money to a charity on each person's behalf?

Image courtesy of Flickr/Burns!