Who says 140 characters isn’t enough to say something constructive? Matt Stewart is writing an entire novel that way.
Yes, Stewart is publishing his entire 480,000 character book at 130 characters at a time (to leave room for hashtags and links) on Twitter. To be clear, the book, called The French Revolution (being released today, appropriately on Bastille Day), is already written. But Stewart and his agent couldn’t get any publishers to bite, so they decided to go the non-traditional route, to say the least.
Here’s how this works: Every so often, Stewart is tweeting out sentences (or incomplete sentences) from the book. No, he’s not doing this by hand, he got a programmer to help him automate the process. The result is slowly spilling out the entire narrative of the book to his Twitter feed.
If you think this would be impossible to follow in a regular stream of tweets, you’re right. That’s why Stewart has a website chronicling the whole story thus far (or, of course, you can simply click on his Twitter page to read it — though backwards). Stewart expects that will will take about 3,700 tweets to get the full story out there.
Others have taken this approach to put pieces of writing on Twitter, and plenty have even crowd-sourced the writing of works on the service. But Stewart believes his is the first full-length literary novel to be released first on Twitter. To commemorate the launch, you can also find his book for free on Scribd, or find it on Amazon’s Kindle for $1.99.
The obvious question is: Is the book any good? It’s too hard to tell at this point. We’re only about 80 updates into the 3,700. Regardless, this seems like a good idea for a guy who couldn’t get a book deal. Who knows, maybe he’ll even land a book deal now to write about his experience in publishing a book on Twitter.
what a dumb idea. itll look like this:
“And thn the frnch revlutn was cool! http://www.bit.ly/iejfhrfhri“
the limit on twitter is its downfall. it forces misspellings, it forces URL shorteners that can be phishing websites or sites with trojan horses, viruses, etc.
True @spelling and URL shorteners
But guys twitter is rocking. In no time you can express yourself.
it’ll?
hahaha clvr
hahaha clvr
The height of stupidity. First, it has already been done. Second, why did TC take the bait on such a foolish PR campaign?
What? You haven’t noticed MG’s other articles like: “Maybe Twitter SHOULD get the nobel peace prize?”
And soon the Kindle will support this form of publishing and pull the tweets in perfectly into digital book form.
I love the interwebs!
I’ll file it next to my collection of Burma Shave roadside ad novels.
Is that a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge or the Verazzano Bridge, and what does either one have to do with the French Revolution?
Guy is from SF. And I think the book takes place here. I think.
Yep – it’s the Golden Gate Bridge – the book is about a San Francisco family, though the plot is structured on The French Revolution.
There are zero intentional typos or word-shortenings – my friend @theutah (who runs the music for the esteemed Utah Bar in SF) wrote a tool that shortens sentences to the nearest word. He’ll continue to improve it, so please do leave comments.
Yeah, reading backwards IS annoying as MG points out, which is why I offer a linear version.
The novel is still under consideration with some publishers as well – will definitely let you guys know.
Enjoy the story and please send feedback to @thefrenchrev – Happy Bastille Day!
Honestly…we get…. Twitter is the greatest bla bla bla. At 144 followers I am sure the book is a real gem and worthy of the lack of attention until now.
How to get a ton of free publicity for ANYTHING? Involve twitter in some way, and everyone will talk about your crappy novel that no one would publish. As long as you can construct a complete sentence, you’re guaranteed a deal on your next book.
The first novel I know of being written on twitter is this one: http://twitter.com/ttaylordude
His isn’t already written (he’s making it up as he tweets it) ttaylordude started his crime novel on June 19 and it’s still going.
ok
Funny…could of sworn I was already doing this via @rastagad, which got suspended last night, right when my follower count reached 666.
Also, Nick Belardes is almost done tweeting his novel this way via @smallplaces for well over a year.
How is this breaking news?
I’m moving my tweets over to @adobbs and the story, an epic fantasy about a wizard who doesn’t believe in magic is at http://www.scri...et-Kingdom-Lost
According to this kid – http://bit.ly/E25m6 – we are just a bunch of old adults. Nothing to see here – because the kiddies will just roll their eyes – “Another twitter post… sigh” …
the 1st Twitter Soap based off a novel written by @kirsteno
Here’s how history would role out if we adopted 140 characters to real world discussions (funny!!):
http://www.yout...h?v=s7oqUfe5pug
I wish Matt luck on his Twitter Novel. My Twitter novel, “No Good End,” has been growing on Twitter for a month now, except I am writing this one on the fly. It evolves every day, like life. It is a murder mystery. Check it out: http://twitter.com/ttaylordude
Or see the last month in chronological order at http://terrytay...r.posterous.com
I love hearing about innovative ways that people are using Twitter, even if some think that Twitter is overhyped.
You can debate the quality of the novel all you want (and most people would even if the book was a traditional, non-Twitter novel), but I think it’s important to note trends that are now taking place because of the Twitter platform. Who cares if Matt Stewart wasn’t the first person to implement this strategy?
The Twitter-sized attention span (perhaps the antithesis of a McDonald’s super-sized item?) is permeating society.
Have you ever heard of dailylit.com? People are craving short snippets of writing.
Awful awful AWFUL! Just a gimmick from a guy who couldn’t get a book deal. Like the Japanese cell phone novels, this crap will fall by the wayside.
It would be a lot cooler if he actually WROTE the book 140 characters at a time via twitter.
Is that how good literature is written?
Maybe…but not yet.
I was gonna keep quiet but figured, what the hell I’ll troll a little today: this idea sucks and I won’t be following them tweeterings. That is all.
Thank god someone at TC has some sense.
Look forward to selling you the book later, Robin!
Hate to disagree with most of you but I have seen novels on twitter do very well. I am following Terry Taylor’s novel No Good End ( http://twitter.com/ttaylordude ) and really enjoy it, I guess it depends on the story and how well it’s written. He’s got roughly 2000 followers, assuming they are all reading that’s pretty good for a month. Good books will do well no matter what the medium, that’s my opinion. Best of luck man on you book.
I AM SO TIRED OF TWITTER COVERAGE. Please cover something else! Twitter doesn’t have *that* many users. Facebook has many more users and those users browse the site much more frequently. Your coverage is absurdly disproportionate!
But Facebook is starting to look more like Twitter every day. Also, just so you know, we made a pact among writers to post 5 stories on Twitter every time someone comes here to complain about us writing about Twitter all the time when the title of the post clearly mentions Twitter. Twitter!
st – my technology news aggregator (tFeeder) has a keyword filter, which lets you filter news by keywords (Google, Facebook, Twitter).
It also has a !Twitter filter, which displays all news stories NOT about Twitter. There are many uninteresting stories about Twitter coming from the top technology blogs.
fun schtick.
Reading it backwards calls for a Memento-like narrative structure being applied for any type of twitterature
)
Why doesn’t he just use something like blurb.com to print his book? This seems like a dumb idea.
Also done by @johnmbaird. He’s been at it for quite some time. The novel is also here: http://manwhodo...t.blogspot.com/
Well if you havent noticed, everything is going to social networking, digital and smaller, I found ttaylordude on twitter (http://twitter.com/ttaylordude) and loved the story! this way I can check it on my Iphone every couple of hours and read up on the story. And he writes it as he goes! Thats what i find to be so cool. That must be hard as hell! But hey I like it this way I dont have to carry around a thick book to read when i never have time. Instead each new post adds to the intensity of the story! I think this idea will take off like youtube did when it first started!
Hmm.. this should be interesting! Is the book released in Kindle at the same time???
It sure is Spencer – here’s the link – http://www.amaz...m/dp/B002GWUVL8
Please let me know what you think!
Pathetic.
http://www.twittercontd.com/
This allows up to 1250 characters per tweet
seems a good way to save a lot of time.
His website with the twitter feed should at least have the first tweet at the top and the most recent tweet at the end. people are going to sick of reading it backwards (if they read it at all).
This is very creative but do you really think anyone will read it this way. Why not take a few bucks and buy the real thing save you time and page scrolling.
check out @funnyatthetime
Such a novel idea but in the wrong place. Twitter has changed so much from it’s original concept that its purpose now is lost. Is it a social medium, is it a business medium? Modifying anything is good as long as it is used to improve something. To modify something for one’s own gain is another story.
Been writing a Twitter novel from scratch since april, not a new idea……
If anyone can do it, who cares?
If the guy wanted fame, he could have just self published the book and do heavy promotion of it all over the net through usage of social networking sites and social bookmarking sites. Yeah self promotion is a lot of work, but work pays off in the end.
Not the first. I think the first to be started was @140novel. Started in Jan of 2008. I starte and finnished posting my wifes novel Cowboy at http://www.twit....com/talkingcat 3501 entries and finnished in Oct of 2008. I belive that makes the the first novel to be fininshed on twitter.