‘The French Revolution’, a novel by Matt Stewart will be the first book ever published exclusively on Twitter. The book will be published line by line in Tweets on the American Authors Twitter page.
Stewart estimates that it will take approximately 3,700 Tweets to completely post the 95,000 word strong novel. The idea to publish the novel on Twitter came out of a lack of support for his book from publishers around the world.
Stewart doesn’t expect anyone to read the entirety of his book on Twitter, but hopes that it “could lead to a couple of sales for those who are interested in reading more”. Something which can be done through the use of Amazon’s Kindle service where the book will be available for the affordable price of $1.99.
By publishing his work on Twitter Stewart “can get instant feedback from readers” and can then “discuss the intricacies of the characters and plot twists as they develop”. However from a brief look at the Twitter page it is obvious that unless you have read the Tweets from the very beginning of the exercise, catching up on the progress of the book is rather difficult. Also with personal posts thanking readers for their comments mixed with the novel Tweets it can be difficult to accurately follow the flow of the novel as well as feeling immersed within the story. This is however aided slightly by the incorporation of the hash tag: #frrev.
Physically posting the 3,700 required tweets is a feet within itself, not to mention the amount of management and organisation needed to ensure posts are not duplicated. Only time will tell if this form of publishing will actually work and Stewart explains that by utilising Twitter it is forming part of a social experiment to “see how the world reacts to a long-form take told in snippets”.
