Twitterature

Would you like to read Ulysses 140 characters at a time? Is a short story just too long? Then curl up with a BlackBerry and dive into Twitter Lit—micro novels, online book clubs, and (gasp) real books.

“The bloody axe still on him, still dripping with the little fellow’s blood,” reads a line somewhere in the middle of Roger N. Morris’s book, A Gentle Axe. So far, an elderly prostitute has found the corpse of a large man swinging from a tree, and a dead dwarf in a snowdrift nearby. She has run for help. But I have to wait at least another hour to know what happens next.

That’s because I’m reading this book on Twitter, in tiny, 140-character updates. An hour later, I’m in the middle of answering an email when a little gift arrives at the corner of my screen: the next micro-installment of A Gentle Axe, which was published in 2007 and is now being serialized on Twitter. Embarrassed that I’d left the dead man hanging, I click for my next bite: ‘The dwarf was dead?’ ‘Murdered! His head bashed in. And the axe that did it was on the big one.’

Twitter has created new ways for authors and readers to interact, not to mention a little PR for a product or title.

James Bridle, a 28-year-old Brit who works in publishing and constantly experiments with literature on the Web, built a similar program that released Ulysses on Twitter, in 140-characer segments every 15 minutes. Although the book famously unfolds over a single day, it took eight months to Tweet. The retelling developed quite a following, Bridle not included. “I didn’t follow it, because it was kind of annoying,” Bridle said of his own project. “I didn’t want James Joyce talking to me every 15 minutes.”

While some, like Morris and Bridle, have moved books to Twitter, countless other authors are doing it in reverse, and turning “tweets”—those juicy (and cheap) little snippets—into books. And a new genre is born: Twitter Lit.

Yes, books have been published from blogs for years. But now, as the publishing industry slumps, microblogs like Twitter and Tumblr have turned out to be a place for writing to thrive. Several authors, publishers, independent booksellers, and even book clubs have set up shop on Twitter, and are benefiting from its expanding community. Twitter has created new ways for authors and readers to interact, not to mention a little PR for a product or title.

Take, for example, the brand-new Picador Book Club on Twitter–in which the publishing imprint chooses a selection of its own titles every few weeks for Twitterati to read and discuss. “As opposed to a book club that meets once a month, this will be every few hours,” said Darin Keesler, Picador’s VP of marketing and sales. “It’s our hope that it will have a really great effect on sales.”

The club’s first title will be Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor, which will be discussed on Twitter on April 10, followed by Augusten Burroughs’s A Wolf at the Table. Burroughs, a fellow Twit, will be in on the discussion. “Twitter enables people to have a lot more contact with authors, which is a good thing, and it’s something that publishing hasn’t done traditionally very well,” James Bridle said.

Bridle printed two years' worth of posts in a book, My Life in Tweets, through a self-publishing service. Though he’s not sharing it with anyone, Bridle is satisfied simply seeing his Twitter activity in hard copy. “In part, you realize all the work that went into it,” he says of the book. “In part you’ve realized how much time you’ve wasted.”