Tiberius, sorry I couldn't respond earlier but I've been extremely busy these past few weeks with the purchase of a new home.

I'm not sure if anyone has really succeeded commercially in a project of this type. My initial interest was mainly to share ideas with a group and engage in some creative enterprise that could bear fruit in terms of bringing together a group of like minded people who would be interested in pooling their creative talents and create a novel set in ancient Rome based on their collective knowledge / imagination.

I guess anything could become successful from a commercial perspective if you have something novel to say that would engage the average reader. The key is, of course, story, story and story and how you engage an audience with that.

The framework is very flexible and I for one do not believe that we should model our work based on what has worked in the past or for someone else. Each idea is unique and when I set out the framework, it was more illustrative than anything else and perhaps, once we have a team together, the first order of the day would be to come up with a plausible, engaging plot line and then build upon that, focusing on the average person in Rome and giving people a feeling of what it was like to live in those times and experience the world around you.