Electric Lit Co-Founder on Rick Moody’s Twitter Experiment

Earlier this week, the literary journal Electric Literature generated an online debate after serializing a Rick Moody short story on Twitter. Today’s guest on the Morning Media Menu was the journal’s co-founder Scott Lindenbaum, analyzing the experiment and answering critics.

Lindenbaum explained how the journal gained more than 10,000 followers during the three-day event, increasing the site’s traffic by 300 percent. “[Moody] emailed me and said, ‘This kind of readership, this potential readership is something a short story I’ve written hasn’t had for a very very long time, if ever,’” the journal co-founder explained.

Lindenbaum said that the journal will publish on Twitter again, and downplayed the backlash. “All of a sudden, the experiment went from ‘cool’ to ‘troubled’ ‘failure’ to ‘utter failure’ in these peoples’ perspectives–despite the fact that 32,000 people saw it on Twitter with a ten-to-one positive ratio of comments. Of the 32,000 probably a couple hundred at most [had Twitter frustrations] but that became the coverage of the story.”

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