[Reader-list] An Original Novel On Twitter

[Chintan]

3,700 Tweets And 480,000 Characters Later, There Will Be An Original Novel
On Twitter<http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/3700-tweets-and-480000-characters-later-there-will-be-an-original-novel-on-twitter/>

by MG Siegler <http://www.techcrunch.com/author/mg/> on July 14, 2009

Who says 140 characters isn’t enough to say something
constructive<http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/04/short-is-sweet-postcards-begat-sms-begat-twitter/>?
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<http://www.thefrenchrev.com/>(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<http://twitter.com/thefrenchrev>
.

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<http://www.thefrenchrev.com/>chronicling the whole story thus
far (or, of course, you can simply click on
his Twitter page <http://twitter.com/thefrenchrev> 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<http://www.scribd.com/doc/17289063/The-French-Revoution-a-novel-by-Matt-Stewart>,
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.