Sunday, December 2, 2012

Executive Severance - the Best-Selling Twitter Novel in the United States - at the Twitter Fiction Festival

There were some amazing things going on over on Twitter last weekend! Under the hashtag #TwitterFiction, microblogging literature came into its own! First it was my live-tweeted mystery novel, Executive Severance, now the nation's best selling Twitter novel. Then The New Yorker Magazine tweet-published Jennifer Egan's short story, "Black Box." Along the way Elinor Lipman tweeted a poem a day about the elections, the first 200 collected in Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus.

Now Twitter has sponsored an international fiction festival, calling upon the Twitter public (essentially all of us) to bring our creative juices to the Twitter format. Many of these efforts are still available for review on Twitter. The complete list of showcased authors can be found here.

The first three chapters of Executive Severance, were tweeted as part of this Twitter Fiction Festival and are still available at the Twitter account @Twitstery. This is the home account of the forthcoming sequal to Executive Severance which will begin early in 2013, once I've digested all of the many innovations I witnessed at the Twitter Fiction Festival. All participants in the Twitter Fiction Festival are to be commended. They are pioneers in exploring the storytelling potentials of this new medium.

Still under review is whether there is a way for Twitter authors to earn a living from their craft. My own revenue route was to gather my story tweets into a book format, which is certainly an easier read than scrolling backwards through the Twitter archive. While I haven't yet made the New York Times Bestsellers list, there can be NO DOUBT that Executive Severance is the best selling Twitter novel in the United States! As Tweeting becomes an accepted format for serializing fiction, is there a way to subscribe to a Twitter stream or otherwise allow an author to collect some payment for their efforts?

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