First Full-Length Novel Released on Twitter

Matt Stewart is releasing his 480,000 character full-length literary novel on Twitter. The character count is important because you can only use 140 characters per tweet. Stewart has started tweeting his book which should take about 3,700 tweets to complete. He is adds hashtags and a link in each tweet meaning he only has 130 characters left for book content. Stewart says this is a Twitter first.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/14/3700-tweets-and-480000-characters-later-there-will-be-an-original-novel-on-twitter

"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.

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