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Electric Literature 3 books in series. Matthew Korahais, Katya Schapiro Length: Matthew Korahais , Katya Schapiro Length: Add to basket failed. Please try again later. Add to wishlist failed. When we were at The Brooklyn Review , for instance, which is a really good example of a traditional literary magazine, we had no money to do that. We would spend almost the entire budget [buying] pizza [for the staff] and then printing the thing. For instance, we have a thing called the Single Sentence Animation Series where we will take a writer we are going to publish — like Rick Moody, who was in our most recent issue — [and] we will take a single sentence from his story that he selects, give [the selected sentence] to an animator, [and] let them riff on it in any way that they desire….
They will come up with something [and] then we give it to a musician. They score [the animated sentence], and then we put it out on YouTube. We can pay everyone all along the way in this process. A small amount, but still it makes it so that there is a real incentive there.
Editorial Reviews. About the Author. Colson Whitehead, a MacArthur Fellow, is the author Similar books to Electric Literature No. 2. “Paper Masks” by Jim Ruland, recommended by Electric Literature 2: Love Has No Inertia There is no such thing as an accidental death.
And we get to create a great art object. We are able to engage with our readers where they already are, which is on YouTube, looking for interesting content. Maybe they are, but now there is some real interesting, creative, collaborative content on YouTube that is related to Moody and it kind of brings them back toward our brand and hopefully back toward reading. I would like to say a little bit more about our videos. By using prominent artists and prominent musicians sometimes, we expose their audiences … to literary work, and then we expose our literary followers to the work of these artists and musicians.
We want it to be a vital part of our culture…. These experiments that we do online and with new media are all about keeping literature a part of the dialogue. The mission of Electric Literature turns into a 2-pronged initiative. It is using innovative distribution … and then using new media in order to create that kind of dialogue. We are talking about distributing through the iPhone — we were the first literary magazine to do that — [and] the iPad. We are talking about reaching readers on the Kindle…. The model that we are trying to create sets a precedent, and it shows how by rearranging the elements and finding where people are used to paying for content you can then pay the creative people as well — the content creators.
So it is very important that people understand that [Electric Literature] is not an online magazine. We are talking about new distribution — totally new. The iPad is right now. We are talking then about agitating for literature by using new media.
You just talked about the animation of a single sentence from a particular story. Electric Literature also had a Rick Moody story that was distributed as a series of posts on Twitter. How do you decide on which platforms are best for distributing individual pieces of content? When we did the Rick Moody serialization — micro serialization — it is not that no one had ever Tweeted a story in segments before. But Rick wrote it for Twitter.
And that makes it different because he is taking into consideration the constraints of the medium. Knowing the way people use Twitter and knowing the character restraint, he was able to craft a narrative that would live on Twitter specifically. So now you are talking about creative content being made specifically for a distribution platform.
When we micro serialized it, we would roll out 1 of the Tweets that made up the story every ten minutes for 3 days. Rick described it as kind of [like] writing haiku that also kind of had a cumulative effect as well — each Tweet being kind of a satisfying experience on its own and then the larger narrative also being told over time. We took that [story] and in a strange kind of reverse, we ended up reprinting it in the print issue.
You really do feel like you are getting a kind of collection of something designed for another medium. It is really important, I think, that the content match the medium. People, when they are reading, can kind of sniff out when something is just being cut up or done in a way just to try to take advantage of Twitter because Twitter is cool, as opposed to something really trying to take advantage of Twitter [with] all the kinds of restraints that it would take to really make something [specifically] for Twitter or for YouTube.
At the end of the day, we ended up netting about , followers, which is more than any publisher in the world. So people really did seem to enjoy it.
Yeah, he said when he wrote it that he had the little Twitter window open at the same time and he was constantly checking [to see if his updates fit the character limit. You have worked with Rick Moody and Colson Whitehead and a lot of other well-known authors. When you first started out, how did you convince them to buy into this whole concept?
In the beginning, of course, it was the hardest. Jim Shepherd was up in western Massachusetts, and I rented a car and drove 6 hours so I could buy him a cup of coffee and talk to him about it.
But the thing that united them is that they were all as equally concerned about the future of literary content as we were. I think our passion for keeping it vital and kind of using digital technology to revitalize it was very clear to them. I think that when we outlined our approach it seemed to make sense.
In the end, they took a big risk by supporting us. We are super grateful to them, but also having them take that risk upped the ante for us as to making sure that we actually delivered on our promise. We hustled and we still are hustling to make this thing successful. We are working 60 hours a week. It has been very affirming and it makes me feel like what we are doing is working and people do want to get involved.
The mission of Electric Literature turns into a 2-pronged initiative. Rope by Joshua Harmon, Recommended by Dzanc. And works go viral, in terms of what people are reading and who becomes popular. Yeah, he said when he wrote it that he had the little Twitter window open at the same time and he was constantly checking [to see if his updates fit the character limit. Goebel, Recommended by FC2. So you and I could read Twelve Blue in completely different orders.
You spoke in a panel at the conference today about how difficult it is for traditional publishers to innovate, that it is difficult for innovative ideas to make their way up the ranks. What do you think is blocking those ideas? What do you think traditional publishers can do to foster more of an environment for innovation? I was talking to a very prominent editor and he was talking about one of his authors who had a huge following on the Internet. This [author is a] very funny guy, and they wanted to do an iPhone application for him. We want to be able to have our own people work on it.