In today’s publishing world, Twitter and the blogosphere are the new breeding grounds for many book authors, yet some writers express frustration when trying to strike a balance between the demands of both short and long writing. Some simply bow out when it comes time to write a book.
Yet, audiences want both short and long writing, often from the same writers. While many writers walk up and down that continuum, some find that certain content demands a certain length.
Forbes’ Lewis DVorkin earlier this month examined the strategies of two different Forbes writers on his blog. Each writer creates high quality content, generates conversation, and generates thousands of page views for Forbes.com, but each focuses on either long form or short form writing and excels at their chosen medium.
Forbes staffer Eric Savitz, DVorkin wrote, focuses on short form content — churning out 10 posts or more a day and keeping all posts “short and punchy.” Medical writer Matt Herper, on the other hand, focuses on long form and writes less frequently than Savitz, but writes in-depth, long form pieces. Dvorkin points out in his analysis that both Savitz’ and Herper’s strategies are equally successful, yet each one has to focus his energy on either long form or short form to be able to create truly excellent, original content.
Today, it is often the shortest of all writing, a hyperactive Twitter feed or a blog with a quirky and unique theme, that opens the doors to the longest of all writing, the book. But some new media stars who land book deals seem to put their Internet activity on hold – indicating that even in a world where an original Twitter feed can elevate you to stardom, writing a book is still sought after as the most serious achievement for any content creator.
Two months ago, Twitter star Andy Carvin issued his 100,000th tweet – to announce that he would be temporarily stepping back from his now-famous Twitter activities to pursue writing a book instead.
During the Arab Spring this year, Carvin became famous for using his Twitter feed to curate live first-person accounts of the revolutions taking place in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain and elsewhere. Carvin has often been credited with reinventing journalism as curation. On an average day he might tweet 200 times. Currently, Carvin has amassed over 58,000 Twitter followers.
Managing the @acarvin Twitter feed became his full time job, and his unique style of reportage – curating the tweets of citizens in the Middle East as they experienced the revolutions in real time – was noted by journalism experts and readers alike as pioneering a brand new style of reporting driven by the use of Twitter.
Writing the book, however, demands putting his Twitter curation on the backburner – which is the very thing that led to his book in the first place. Carvin told me over email, “If I have something longer I want to write, I shut off Twitter until I feel like I’ve accomplished something… Multitasking short-form and long-form writing isn’t easy, so there’s no shame on concentrating on one at a time.”
I wanted to start this sooner, but it was hard to find a decent amount of time to dive into it until after Tripoli fell – and even since then it hasn’t been easy. So I figured the best thing to do was to force myself to take a week off of work just to see if I could come up with something that’d be worth pursuing further. It’s not like I’m gonna crank out an entire book in a week; if I wanted to do that, I’d just copy and paste all my tweets into a Word document and call it a day.
Dan Sinker started out writing the @MayorEmanuel Twitter feed, a hilarious and wildly creative fictional Twitter feed that imagined Rahm Emanuel’s inner thoughts as he campaigned for Mayor of Chicago. As the Chicago elections intensified, writing the @MayorEmanuel tweets required almost constant attention to keep its hundreds of thousands of followers supplied with original, creative content under 140 characters several times a day. Once Emanuel won the race, Sinker shut down the Twitter feed – and promptly landed a deal to publish a book with Scribner, inspired by his tweets.
Sh*t My Dad Says is another original Twitter feed that led to a book deal. It started with 29-year-old Justin Halpern sharing the quirky things his dad said on a daily basis. The Twitter feed exploded in popularity, gaining millions of followers and landing Halpern a book deal and a CBS sitcom deal. The sitcom has since debuted and been cancelled. Now, Halpern still maintains the Twitter feed, but posts new updates only once every few months.
This trend raises the question: are long form and short form writing mutually exclusive? Can writers do both successfully at the same time?
Of course, many successful long form writers still maintain Twitter feeds even as they write books – but what they do on Twitter is far different from what Halpern, Carvin or Sinker do.
Maintaining a creative, original, highly active Twitter feed that amasses thousands or even millions of followers is far different from tweeting a few times a week about what one is doing.
Poynter recently interviewed author Jennifer Weiner, who is very active on Twitter while also writing books; but the way she interacts on Twitter is very different than the way Andy Carvin or Dan Sinker do. Weiner tweets daily updates and interacts with her readers; Carvin and Sinker are curating original content on Twitter. This kind of shortform writing demands singular focus and attention to create completely original content at such a high frequency each day, or to monitor a broad swath of the Web to curate first-person accounts of protesters the way Carvin does – it requires so much full-time maintenance that talk has begun of “how to scale @acarvin.”
Kate Lee, one of the first book editors to seek out bloggers and new media stars, says: “I look at how often they post, the amount of engagement their content inspires (number of comments/reblogs/retweets), their overall platform (traffic/twitter followers/outside recognition as an expert), and the kinds of people that link to them (influential/meaningful in their field).”
“A book is a way for anyone – a blogger, a professor hoping to get tenure, etc. – to be seen as an expert or credible source on a topic,” she added.
What all of this suggests is that long form and short form writing are, at the end of the day, mutually exclusive for writers to create simultaneously. Writers can’t do both at the same time – something has to give. Writers have to alternate between long form and short form or phase them in and out. Creating original and truly exceptional and valuable content, whether long form or short form, demands a journalist’s complete focus — excelling at both simultaneously is near impossible.
Also making it difficult to excel at both long form and short form is the fact that in the last couple of years, blogging as a medium itself has evolved tremendously.
Blogging used to be the cutting edge of “short form” writing, and was a medium that wielded incredible power and disrupted the world of journalism. But now, Twitter, Tumblr, Storify and others present a whole range of short form mediums that have made blogging less relevant.
For some journalists, blogging is too long form; why blog when it is faster to break news on Twitter? Or aggregate first person accounts on Storify? And for others, blogging has become too frenetic — like journalist-turned-blogger Marc Ambinder, who announced he was ditching blogging to go back to focusing on long form reporting and who this week announced he was leaving daily journalism to work on longer projects. With the growing amount of information and tools that are out there, blogging simply isn’t as attractive a short form medium as it used to be.
But long form is still attractive. New media-bred writers still seek the credibility and gravitas that can come from publishing a book or other serious long form work. Twitter, Tumblr, and blogs can win them accolades and followers – but even today, long form writing can allow them to gain the expert status they seek. Short form writing – creative, smart, and original – can be a stepping stone to a successful writing career.
At the end of the day, you can’t put a Twitter feed on a bookshelf.
