"Tweeting" Stories?

[stonetools]

News many will be quickly thrilled by: Brooklyn author Jennifer Egan has composed a short story revolving around a character from her 2011 Pulitzer winner A Visit From the Goon Squad. News many may be instantly worried about/fearful of/angered by: This story, an 8,500-word piece, will debut on The New Yorker's NYerFiction Twitter account Thursday evening and be serialized over the span of ten nights, with one tweet posted per minute between the hours of 8 and 9 p.m. Eastern. Each tweet is a new entry in a spy's mission log; the tale is titled "Black Box."

LINK

A story told on Twitter-and by a highly regarded BPH author under the auspices of the high-toned New Yorker magazine, no less!

Wave of the future?

And if it is the WotF , do you like the concept?

[taustin]

A stunt, nothing more.

[plib]

Originally Posted by stonetools

And if it is the WotF , do you like the concept?

I think I've just figured out what all those "three-martini lunches" accomplish, although this one appears to have been at least six martinis.

[Barty]

Well I really liked VttGS, so I'll check it out.

It's not that stunty. The book after all contains a chapter written by a dyslexic (autistic?) character and presented as a series of infographs.

[JoeD]

A stunt and probably both a good and bad one.

With so many tweets (one per minute?!?!) you're going to be filling all of your followers feeds and washing away tweets by anyone else they're following. Unless someone is specifically following to read the story, I'd expect people might unfollow during the coming days of text.

Although from the pov of publicity, it's probably already a success as it'll get people talking about it.

[GeckoFriend]

One more reason to avoid the whole Twitter mindset.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by GeckoFriend

One more reason to avoid the whole Twitter mindset.

Not that I was ever interested in Twitter to begin with, but I definitively decided, no, never, not even on a bet, when the guy built an office chait that would tweet when he farted.

[stonetools]

What next.? Can you imagine a movie or novel in which James Bond will tweet his reports to Q?
Or is such a concept just too forward looking for the Internet savvy techies of MR?

Anyway, here is a major novelist using the tools of the Internet to not only reach out to fans, but to create maybe a new literary form-Twitter fiction.

So far the response seems to be "We don't need no new stuff, young whippersnapper. And get off my lawn."

So how is this any better than just putting the whole story up on a blog, even if at a rate of a chapter a day? I mean breaking it up into "tweets" adds what?

[5thWiggle]

Originally Posted by taustin

Not that I was ever interested in Twitter to begin with, but I definitively decided, no, never, not even on a bet, when the guy built an office chait that would tweet when he farted.

Considering my opinion of social media, building one of those chairs would be to only reason I'd open a Twitter or Facebook account. Maybe I'll build a Tweeting Toilet©

[Lastblade]

I don't have an account with Twitter, but if I did, I would check it out just to see. I am willing to give anything a chance.

[HomeInMyShoes]

Stunt, but I give it a thumbs up. If it gets even a few people to read a short story they never would have read it was worth it. Sure it's a bit of a cheesy marketing ploy, but it's also asking a few questions as to what a story is and what publishing means as well.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is still on my list to read this year.

[JoeD]

Originally Posted by stonetools

What next.? Can you imagine a movie or novel in which James Bond will tweet his reports to Q?
Or is such a concept just too forward looking for the Internet savvy techies of MR?

Anyway, here is a major novelist using the tools of the Internet to not only reach out to fans, but to create maybe a new literary form-Twitter fiction.

So far the response seems to be "We don't need no new stuff, young whippersnapper. And get off my lawn."

It's not the use of new tech that's the problem, for example, when authors started to show snippets of their books in blog posts, that was great. It's the use of new tech in a way that's just, clunky.

Twitter is for checking up on what other people are doing and for what is going on in the world at that moment in time (i.e trending). It doesn't feel to me that it's a suitable mechanism for distributing a book, even a short story at that. As a one off stunt for PR, sure. but that doesn't make it any less of a stunt.

Now, had the author decided to tweet once or twice a day as their "character" and let the story unfold over weeks as part of your natural twitter feed, I might even follow them. Maybe that's an idea one of the MR authors could take advantage of and gain some free press over

PS as for tweeting reports to Q, that could work, as long as they're in a kind of code that just falls in with the background noise of all the other tweets (Managed to burn my raspberry pi today) and of course, hopefully Mr Bond is smart enough to not tweet under @JamesBond007 (license to tweet)

[JoeD]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

So how is this any better than just putting the whole story up on a blog, even if at a rate of a chapter a day? I mean breaking it up into "tweets" adds what?

PR value.

[RainingLemur]

It's an interesting concept, but it would probably bug the crap out of me to see parts of the story throughout the day bumping out other news and stuff off of the feed.