Matt Stewart, Twitter, and The French Revolution
Last week, Denise Oswald at Soft Skull acquired the rights to Matt Stewart‘s debut novel, The French Revolution, which you can also check out on Twitter (if reading a novel backwards, 140 characters at a time is your thing).
Stewart is a marketer by day, and says he got the idea to “tweet” his novel while using Twitter for his marketing job. “When in doubt,” he explains, “Hitch your star to a speeding comet.”
Stewart and his agent, Lisa Grubka, had been finding it difficult to place the book (which has been compared to A Confederacy of Dunces) with publishers, who had given him “rave rejections” because they worried that his material was too risky for the market. (Sound familiar?)
It seems Soft Skull was already very interested in the novel. They didn’t discover Stewart on Twitter, and it’s likely they would have picked him up anyway on the strength of his manuscript.
What Stewart did, however, was demonstrate to the publishers that he had ideas about marketing his book which they felt were relevant to today’s market. He showed that he would be an active part of the marketing process if they picked him up. Publishers look for these qualities in an author. So do agents. A good marketing idea is probably what sealed this deal.
There’s a good interview with Matt Stewart at Editor Unleashed.
Will people actually read the novel on Twitter? Probably not. Which I’d imagine makes this method of online publishing less of a risk to first rights than what I did.
Congratulations to Matt Stewart. Not only has he procured his deal, he’s also put himself on the map as apioneer in the ever-changing world of book marketing. Talk about your two birds with one stone.
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