Serving Literature by the Tweet by Felicia R. Lee

Serving Literature by the Tweet
by Felicia R. Lee

The founders of Electric Literature, a new quarterly literary magazine, seek nothing less than to revitalize the short story in the age of the short attention span. To do so, they allow readers to enjoy the magazine any way they like: on paper, Kindle, e-book, iPhone and, starting next month, as an audiobook. YouTube videos feature collaborations among their writers and visual artists and musicians. Starting next month, Rick Moody will tweet a story over three days.

In its first two issues, this year, the magazine showcased some of the country’s best writers – Michael Cunningham, Colson Whitehead, Lydia Davis, Jim Shepard — and created the kind of buzz that is a marketer’s dream. With a debut issue in June and an autumn issue out last week, each consisting of five stories, the magazine has racked up complimentary reviews everywhere from The Washington Post to a blogger on Destructive Anachronism, who wrote, “High quality content + innovative marketing + multimedia could just equal the new model for literature, post-print.”

The brains behind Electric Literature are Andy Hunter, 38, and Scott Lindenbaum, 26, writers who met in 2006 at Brooklyn College’s M.F.A. program in fiction writing. From an office of roughly 300 square feet in an industrial building between the Dumbo and Fort Greene neighborhoods, they added an iPhone application in July, a month after their first issue.

“Everyone is reading short-form text,” said Mr. Hunter, the editor in chief. “Literature has not made that jump.”

Mr. Lindenbaum, the fiction editor, added, “The short form could work increasingly well in a hectic age.”

Jeffrey Lependorf, executive director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, an organization that aids independent literary publications, said using new media to deliver content was not an original strategy but that Electric Magazine had a distinctively comprehensive approach.

“A lot of our members have done some of these things, but I am not certain that they have done all of them,” Mr. Lependorf said of Electric Literature’s marketing strategy.

The anthology may have been first with an iPhone application, as its founders claim, he said, because it is a new technology. Of the 350 active council members (and hundreds of others that publish irregularly or in tiny numbers), he said, “less than a handful” are on Kindle.

Electric Literature is coming along at a time when all sectors of the publishing world face challenges because of a weak economy, Mr. Lependorf said. Writers complain that they drown in the great middle between the mega-sellers like Dan Brown and the avant-garde work produced in small quantities.

Mr. Cunningham said he allowed Electric Literature to use an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, “Olympia,” in the debut issue “as a vote of confidence” for Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum, who were his students in the M.F.A. program at Brooklyn College.

“I’d been waiting for someone to do something more interesting on the Internet with fiction,” said Mr. Cunningham, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Electric Literature’s YouTube videos “maintain the integrity of the written word and extend its range,” he added.

For the first issue, Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum had animated videos created for all the stories after asking the writers (Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Shepard, T Cooper, Lydia Millet and Diana Wagman) to select a single sentence for the animator to interpret.

Mr. Shepard’s video has received 9,000 hits, Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum said, and a video based on Mr. Whitehead’s story about a comedian, in the second issue, has about 600 hits and is picking up traffic.

As for Mr. Moody, he said he came up with the idea of Twitter fiction after he fell in love with the new form. “It’s like trying to write in haiku continuously,” he said in an e-mail message.

“I like that E.L. seems as though it will try just about anything, and I think it’s important for literature that it’s always pushing the envelope, colliding with other forms, trying to find new envelopes for its message, and generally renewing itself,” Mr. Moody’s message continued. He called it a method that was partly pioneered by magazines like McSweeny’s and Ninth Letter.

Stephen O’Connor, whose story “Love” is in the second Electric Literature issue, said, “They approached me after a story came out in The New Yorker.” At about 12,000 words, he added, “Love” is a bit long for a conventional literary magazine.

“I’m hoping it will be a younger audience, all those kids like my students at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence who are always on Facebook and iPhone,” Mr. O’Connor said.

Mr. Hunter and Mr. Lindenbaum said they were having a lot of fun (there’s a party for the second issue on Wednesday night at an East Village hotspot) but are working long hours and putting in their own money for Electric Literature. Mr. Lindenbaum teaches literature at Brooklyn College, and Mr. Hunter does freelance writing and editing for an organization at the United Nations.

A start-up fund in the mid-five figures came from private investors, they said, and about 25 people consistently donate their time to the magazine as advance readers and editors, as well as video artists and animators who make the YouTube videos.

To publish the paper version, they use print-on-demand; the e-book, Kindle, iPhone and audio versions eliminate printing bills.

“Instead of paying a printer $5,000, we pay five writers per issue $1,000,” Mr. Hunter said.

Their biggest challenge is to get enough subscribers so the venture is self-sustaining. The cost of a subscription is $24 for the electronic version and $48 for paper. So far, they have 800 subscribers and 1,600 in single-copy sales, as well as 1,300 friends on Facebook and an estimated readership of 4,000 and growing.

“We have an optimistic message at a time of pessimism,” Mr. Hunter said. “As writers, we got tired of the doom and gloom. The future is not something you acquiesce to, it’s something you create.”

One thing Electric Literature seems good at is getting people to read serious literature, making it less like homework. As Sara Nelson, the books director of O, the Oprah Magazine, and former editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, said, “Anything that takes the starch out — go for it.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/books/28electric.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb4