Twitter-Lit: Pushes to Become Real Lit!

Would you pay 30$ for a hardcover book of tweets from your favorite Twitter-lit author? (See my earlier posts on Twitter-lit.)

Apparently, there are a lot of people who are interested in doing just that. In fact, an enterprising web-strategy agency called Definitely Something has started a project called TweetBookz, designed to help twits (excuse me ... I mean tweeters) to self-publish their Twitter-lit and then sell their labors in the form of an actual book.

In an interview with Mediabistro's Galleycat, Definitely Something's Rob Goldstone gave a little background about their effort:

"Most of our work is spent on sites like Twitter, on behalf of our clients, and one day we started joking around with the idea that it would be cool to see all our writing in a more permanent form ... So far the reactions have been very positive, with early book orders and lots of blogs picking up on the story. We hope its just the beginning and are ready for the holiday shopping boom."
(Mediabistro 2009, Galleycat Interview with Rob Goldstone)

Regarding who might want to do this, Goldstone commented:

"Others may create books of the tweets they consider their funniest or most inspiration. Some may go to the extreme and pick only tweets about the basics of life such as what they ate or what they did that day. We'd also love to see companies active on Twitter ordering their own TweetBookz as gifts for their employees or customers."
(Mediabistro 2009, Galleycat Interview with Rob Goldstone)

So, what does it all mean? This is not just an enterprising company leveraging some flavor-of-the-month web service. This effort may end up just an "expensive mistake," but it might also be the first of a trend that grows. Self-publishing on the web is ubiquitous and growing exponentially every month. As a publishing luminary said, "The publishing problem has been solved." Meaning, if you want to publish, you are no longer at sufferance to the traditional publishing companies. Literally anyone can cheaply and effectively publish their work, and find an audience.

Obviously, quality control is an issue, and herein lies a major role played by publishers—they filter the flotsam and jetsam. But, now you can hire the same QA services from a subsidy publisher, or third-party editors (another area growing leaps and bounds). The changing role of publishers is a whole, complex post in and of itself, and maybe one day, when I feel like typing a lot, I'll do that post, but for now the point is that Tweetbookz is another example of how it is all changing. Creative people are leveraging technology to increase opportunities for writers—and that's enough to make us all sit up and take notice.

Will it be a flash in the pan? Who knows and who cares. I'm all for anything that gets people writing, expressing themselves and finding their voices, even if it means doing so in 140-character tweets.

Netflix perfected the movie-rental-by-mail model and opened the door for copycat imitators to quickly follow. In this case, however, an innovative company called Bookswim has been trying since 2007 to implement the Netflix model to book rentals.

As Bookswim explains it:

"Bookswim creators George Burke and Shamoon Siddiqui spent their Thursday night as always, freeloading books in the local behemoth bookstore café. When asked to pay for the books along with the coffee, they replied, "No, we're just gonna read them and put them back... but thanks for asking." Now this kind of behavior should never be condoned, but George and Shamoon noticed a pattern: everyone else was doing it, although maybe not so openly. If all of these people were simply reading, why aren't they vagrantly loitering at a library? It's free! Well, there's no double mocha lattes at the library ... but through researching the answer they discovered that the whole literary distribution model needed to be turned upside down." (Bookswim.com 2009)

And so they did … turned things upside down. Through this effort Bookswim hopes to play its part in saving some of the 22-million trees cut down each year to produce books, not to mention the gas that will be saved from driving to the bloody bookstore every week. Okay, the post office uses trucks to ship the books to you, and the local post office drives around town in their little putt-putts, but hey, the point is still valid. So, in short, Bookswim is good for the environment -- and it’s slimming too!

Mediabistro’s Gallycat (the best blog on Earth) has a great interview with Chip O’Brien, Director of Customer service for Bookswim, where he discusses the phenom. Check out the full interview here: GALLYCAT BOOKSWIM INTERVIEW.

It’s a brave new world out there for books, authors, publishers, and readers. I’m fascinated by all these changes and will be commenting more about these new-fangled ideas as I stumble upon them. Who said reading is dead?

Twitter-Lit: The Opportunities for Writers Keep on Coming!

We’re all familiar with adaptation. What novelist doesn’t want his or her book adapted to a movie? Everything is open for the adaptation magnet: poems, books, comics, commercials, everything. This truth is no less true now with so-called new media. As the Internet evolves, so do the windows for creative expression. We now have the first Twitter-lit adaptation to film.

What the hell is Twitter-lit, you ask? Good question. It’s essentially a Twitter haiku. Somebody writes a 140-character fictional message, rather than talking about what he or she had for lunch, or how the job interview was a disaster. As fascinating as your life might be that you have to tell the world what you're doing every 10 minutes, imagine how much fun it might be to just make things up? Because everyone tells EXACTLY what they are doing, and never embellish or make things up on Twitter--right? So, think fiction. Think short. Now think even shorter. Now you're in the ballpark.

This is an exploding phenom, or so Twitter claims. There are more and more people jumping onto this flash-fictionesque platform. Twitter-lit authors submit daily “stories” and are finding a following. This is certainly familiar to fans of flash fiction. This form of fiction (flash) has many devotees, and there is no real agreement on what constitutes flash fiction, but some go as low as 300-word max. Never more than 1000 words.

The most famous form of flash fiction, of course, is the one Hemingway created that was only six-words long: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." This is, in fact, archetypal Twitter-lit. Twitter imposes a maximum character length for any post of 140 characters. So, not unlike other physical formats (poetry, screenplays, short stories, etc.) technology is placing limits on writers, and we must step up to the challenge to prove creativity has no limits, even when they are artificially imposed by the information superhighway pipeline requirements.

Apparently, Twitter-lit authors are pulling it off, because one of them just got adapted to film. See this post from the Mediabistro Galleycat blog by Jason Boog on Oct 08, 2009:

"The world's first Twitter-lit adaptation has won the People's Choice Award at the International Filminute competition. Twitter author Arjun Basu rallied his army of Twitter readers, a readership gained as Basu publishes bite-sized, fictional tweets like this short-short story every day: "They tolerated the ennui of their jobs, bought off by promises of spectacular riches sometime in the future. At retirement, they bought guns." Now Canadian director James Cooper adapted one of Basu's stories into a minute-long film called "Life." As the press release about the winning films shows, the short film genre is booming--start writing your Twitter scripts today... "

So, get out your stubbiest pencil and start writing your pithy, action-packed, visually-stunning Twitter-lit so that all those production companies and studios who regularly farm through these sorts of things looking for the "next big thing" can find you and sign you to a seven-figure deal. Or if that has little or no attraction to you (God, I hope so for your sake), then just do it 'cause it's bloody fun. I just might myself.