novels

3,7000 tweet-long novel

From Tech Crunch:

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... 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.