Comments on: The Rick Moody Twitter Saga: What Are We All Doing Here?

By: Self-Publishing Review | Blog | It's Hard Out There for Everyone

Self-Publishing Review | Blog | It's Hard Out There for Everyone — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 01:48:18 +0000

[...] owners, not just us lowly self-publishers. The post links to another post by the manager of Vroman’s bookstore where he says: The Moody Twitter experiment (and Moody wasn’t to blame for its failure, though [...]

By: Publishing 2.0 ~ by Richard Luck | Pif Magazine

Publishing 2.0 ~ by Richard Luck | Pif Magazine — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 06:57:55 +0000

[...] goals, participating “co-publishers”, and many others in the industry, viewed the effort as a discouraging failure. Some blamed the publisher; some blamed Moody. Either way, the project was doomed to fail from the [...]

By: The Moody Twitter Experiment: Epic Fail, or Noble Failure? | Digital Book World

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:19:32 +0000

[...] Speakeasy post. Today, Vroman’s webmaster Patrick Brown had an insightful post asking, “The Rick Moody Twitter Saga: What Are We All Doing Here?” The Moody Twitter experiment (and Moody wasn’t to blame for its failure, though I’m sure [...]

By: amutualrespect.org » “The Right Shadow Spoke”: A Facebook App Novel Shout-Out

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:19:16 +0000

[...] and a nowhere lit. e-zine just became a major player because they tweeted a short story – badly. This is pretty much the most fun thing I’ve seen in a while – and the least specious re: [...]

By: Staircase Twit | Like Fire

Staircase Twit | Like Fire — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:47:49 +0000

[...] Moody’s story. In the right hands it could have prompted both laughter and reflection: on the insularity of the various communities we build around ourselves, on insiders vs. outsiders, on egalitarianism, on assumptions of intimacy, on identity. Not my [...]

By: Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:53:37 +0000

I personally found the Rick Moody experiment somewhat maddening, and was relieved when the co-publishers I was following stopped the experiment early. I think there’s absolutely a place for fiction on Twitter (see @arjunbasu’s magnificent little self-contained 140-character stories, for instance), but I agree with previous posters that Twitter just wasn’t the right tool for the job. I think of Twitter as a sort of a continuous conversation (a bookseller I know compares it to a very large cocktail party, wherein you can drop in and out of conversations at will), and the Rick Moody tweets had the effect of someone walking into a conversation at a cocktail party and spouting non-sequitors. It seems to me that it’s a poor medium for serialization.

With regards to the value of Twitter itself: there is an echo chamber effect, but at the same time, it’s an echo chamber that I personally find interesting, and I feel that it’s been invaluable to me as a writer. I’ve learned a lot about the book business by following people much more knowledgeable than myself, it’s an easy way to maintain direct contact with both readers and booksellers, and I’ve booked at least three bookstore/reading series events through Twitter (two came about directly through people I met and conversed with on Twitter; one was booked on the basis of Twitter buzz about my first novel, which I have to imagine was greatly helped by the Twitter activities of my impressively social-media-savvy publisher.)

By: Lessons from the Rick Moody Twitter Project

Lessons from the Rick Moody Twitter Project — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:06:44 +0000

[...] wrote Breathe Book’s Susan Weis, “but not one non-bookseller commented on the feed.” In a blog post titled “Is Twitter an echo chamber?” bookseller Vroman’s asked, when booksellers tweet, who [...]

By: Danica

Danica — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:48:02 +0000

Mark Barrett :
>If you do A*N*Y*T*H*I*N*G to disrupt suspension of disbelief

At first this truck a chord of truth with me… but then I wondered, what about radio & television drama? I suspect that this is true to the effect that the pacing of Twitter is not set for us; but I also think that modern day readers might be a little lazy in ingesting information (and thus 140-character feeds are great!). Truly this is not for everyone. But I don’t think that it’s just for those avid readers nor ones interested in the industry.
Even the majority of my friends said Twitter itself was stupid until quite recently. Same goes for blogs. It’s a just a kind of information– drama/fiction– that hasn’t had a lot of life or time to catch on. Maybe it won’t – but @electriclit got a lot out of it.

More experimenting! More data!

Bowerbird said:
>(obnoxious remarks here)

By: Fiction Writers Review » Blog Archive » Serial Fiction

Fiction Writers Review » Blog Archive » Serial Fiction — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 18:14:58 +0000

[...] Moody published a short story serialized into tweets, with one installment posted every 10 minutes. Reactions to the experiment were decidedly mixed, but its existence speaks to the renewed interest in the [...]

By: Mark Barrett

Mark Barrett — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 18:53:06 +0000

First, thank you for taking the time to post this. It’s exactly this kind of personal reflection that helps me see more deeply into the current publishing dynamix.

It’s always critical to distinguish marketing from content — and not simply because marketing always seeks to modify content for its own ends. It’s far too easy to confuse the success or failure of either with the other, and any claim that one has been critical in leveraging the other is always suspect. Does a great story make the marketing easy? Or does great marketing make the selling of any story possible? When a hit happens, what was the difference? When a flop happens, what failed?

The ElectricLit experiment was a marketing experiment, not a content experiment. I say that with some authority because there really are no new forms of fiction. You can put chopped-up stories on Twitter in 140-character bytes, and you can claim that there’s some new performance aspect to doing so, but in the end it’s still a story. At most what you might be proving is that Twitter is a new storytelling medium, where ‘new’ ignores oral storytelling traditions, serialized content, etc.

The great mass of customers — including your customers — is not clamoring for anything new in delivery or form. They may want their traditional stories in e-book format, or as a digital download, but that’s little different than saying they want them in paperback or hardcover.

Experiments like this are done for the sake of the experiment — and for attracting attention. They are not going to change anything — and again, I say that with some authority, having followed the question of interactive storytelling from endless theoretical possibility to limited practical reality.

The only dynamic that matters in fiction is suspension of disbelief. If you do A*N*Y*T*H*I*N*G to disrupt suspension of disbelief, your story fails. Interactivity cannot support suspension of disbelief. I suspect the same is true of Twitter.