Word of the Week: Wovel

Wovel: An audience-plotted novel written in installments for publication on the Internet. A contraction of web and novel; rhymes with novel.

Wovel was coined by Victoria Blake, a founder of Underland Press, which publishes traditional and online books. According to a report on NPR's "Morning Edition":

[Blake] wanted to offer exciting, edgy fiction with a touch of the fantastic, and to make her Web site a primary component of her business. She hired Jesse Pollack to help her with Web programming, and then got together with him, some of his programming friends, a six-pack and a bag of Oreos. They came up with a format that demanded a new name: the wovel.

"A wovel is a Web novel," Blake says. "There's an installment every Monday. At the end of every installment, there's a binary plot branch point with a vote button at the end."

Programmer Pollack describes the wovel format as reminiscent of the old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, with a high-tech twist: "allowing the readers to ... choose their way through and decide on integral changes in the plot."

The earliest citation for wovel to mean "Web novel" may have been in BoingBoing on May 31, 2008.

The NPR segment aired a week ago; there are now more than 34,000 Google hits for wovel + novel.

On the other hand, a search for the single term "wovel" leads to Wovel: World's Safest Snow Shovel! I assume, but was unable to verify, that this Wovel's pronunciation rhymes with shovel.

Comments

[Bill Brohaugh]

To me, this is an exercise in Why? Should a book on tape be a Tovel? The same audiobook on CD, a CDovel? A printed book, a Provel? A Kindle-delivered book, a Kovel?

And what about other web forms? Woetry? Wripts? Wort stories?

Is all this to be termed "WWWriting"?

Neologisms (which I truly love when done right) must a) communicate what no other word or phrase can communicate or communicate it with efficiency or panache, and b) deliver clarity and not confusion or distraction. In regard to that latter point, I see "wovel" and think the good Rev. Spooner was trying to write "vowel," and when I dispel that silly thought, I land on a sillier thought based on a commercial for a kid's toy: "Wovels weeble but they don't fall down."

[Nancy Friedman]

@Bill: I think a Kindle-delivered book is a Kivel. Any resemblance to "kibble" is purely intentional.