Lessons from the Rick Moody Twitter Project
By Andy Hunter, Editor-in-Chief, Electric Literature - Publishing Perpectives

Earlier this month, twenty co-publishers joined Electric Literature in using Twitter to publish Rick Moody's "Some Contemporary Characters," a short story written for the medium in 153 bursts of 140 characters or less. Our goal was to create a conversation, agitate for literature, and expand the readership for Moody's story. It was an inclusive effort that brought publishers, literary magazines, bookstores, writers, and readers together. With the participation of twenty co-publishers, we transmitted the story to over 38,000 followers-a robust audience for a contemporary short story.

To accomplish this, we used a service called Hootsuite, which allowed us to schedule the tweets and broadcast them to all participants, with each tweet published to their feed as their own content-as opposed to retweeting (Twitter's tool which allows users to share material with their followers), which would add an reported. We regret that less attention was paid to the content of Rick's story than its mode of delivery-although that may have been inevitable.

(read on ...)

Is Twitter a Viable Format for Storytelling?
By Edward Nawotka

First there was fast fiction...then there was nano fiction...now there is twitter fiction. At 120 words a burst, Twitter would seem unsuited to narrative fiction. But as our lead editorial today by Andy Hunter, editor-in-chief of Electric Literature demonstrates, Twitter can be used as a format for fiction, provided one is a dedicated follower of the tweets (one can't imagine jumping into the middle of a short story...or can they?) or else knows how to search a Twitter stream for a particular hashtag to see everything as a threaded message and doesn't mind reading as a computer screen scrolls up and not down.

(read on ...)