Dispatches | September 18, 2009

Hello, I’m Jolene, another intern here at TMR and I am thrilled to be a contributing writer for this blog.  My experiences with blogs have all been brief – I used to shun the internet and blush at the mention of Facebook — but now I try to embrace the internet, although still a bit apprehensively .  One thing I have not come around to, however, is twitter.  My roommate always stuns me with her knowledge of pop culutre, practically starting ever sentence with “I heard on twitter”… (she was the first to find out about Michael Jackson’s death, she can tell you the whereabouts of almost any celebrity) , but I never thought this phenomenon of “tweeting” would have an affect on the publishing world.  You can imagine my shock when I learned over at Galley Cat that author Matt Stewart has published his debut novel “The French Revolution” via twitter.   Stewart wrote an interesting article for THE HUFFINGTON POST explaining why he chose to release his novel in this unique manner, and there appears to be a method to his madness.  Stewart’s novel has generated a lot of free publicity and it has even resulted in a traditional book deal.  While the internet and I now co-exist peacefully, I still cringe at the term “social networking”, so I am afraid to ask, is twitter the future of publishing?