Twitter fiction is a fantastic literary phenomenon. It shows how well writers can cope with such a limit as 140 characters. And it brings great results. Many people write fiction on Twitter and the most popular way to follow it is #vss tag. It was originated by the Twitter fiction guru, Very Short Story and quickly adopted by his fans and fellow writers.

This anthology has one outstanding benefit I was not aware until I read it – opposite to Twitter stream, where you read great stories accidentally, you have all the best of it presented the way it should be: organized. Every author in this book has his exceptional voice and brings his unique world to the reader. Just read a couple of his stories in a row and you’re there completely.

Having in mind that Twitter just makes you blink and you’re away in the archives, anthologies like this one have an incredible value.

The book is available for free from Smashwords. You can read it on-line or download to your device. There are many formats available, including ePub, mobi, rtf, pdf and plain text, so I’m sure there is one to fit you e-reading device.

#VSS Anthology is out, but the authors are on. Check what they’re writing about right now on Twitter.

PS. I’m really glad I’m part of this anthology and was helpful in designing the book’s cover.

#VSS Anthology Authors

(in the order of appearance):

Allan Revich  | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Steven Saus | Follow on Twitter

Bryce Anderson | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Deepti Lamba | Follow on Twitter |

Anthony Abelaye | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Jacob Klucker | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Jonathan Pinnock | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Charlie Close | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Mo Ali | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

BL Pawelek | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Jimmie Fisher | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Ed Fonseca | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Jennifer Hudock | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Small Stories | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Rimone | Visit a blog |

Jason Everett Morris

Andrew Freudenberg | Follow on Twitter |

Benjamin S. Wolf | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Helene Kwong | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Ralph Van Den Berg| Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Ryan Harron | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Judy B. | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Tiara Walker | Follow on Twitter |

Seekersince1980 | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Nick Name | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Thoughtsnot | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Moxie Mezcal | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

R. Alexander Spoerer | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Tonya R. Moore | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Hyperreal Japan | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Trent Martin Kirchner | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Tyrone Slopthrop | Follow on Twitter |

Kate Sherrod | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Doug Robertson | Follow on Twitter |

Jason Gusmann | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Dean Clayton Edwards | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Luke Jordan | Follow on Twitter | Visit a blog |

Related posts

• 16.05.2010 -- Ukazała się antologia literatury na Twitterze [notka]
• 03.05.2010 -- Hashtagstories – Stories Written as a Sequence of Twitter Hashtags
• 12.10.2009 -- 15 Free Covers for Twitter Fiction Books
• 09.10.2009 -- #VSS Anthology – vote for your favourite cover!
• 14.08.2009 -- Why #vss and #wpss are good for a writer?

"Fan of Twitter fiction? Check #VSS Anthology" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

It’s almost a year since I started hashtagstories – microstories written with current Twitter hashtags.

Sorry? Stories written with what? A year ago this was weird even to me. But it was just so inspiring to combine the world of hashtags into a piece of a literary fiction that I gave it a try. I also wanted to use it as a way to enter English writing. It was looking like a pretty easy job to do – just collect meaningful, emotional hashtags and scrabble them into a story.

After a year I can tell you – hashtagstories are not easy. They are a hard work. I had to go through many Twitter-based services to find the best source of hashtag info. Previously I was using Hashtags.org, now it’s What the Trend.

There are spam hashtags. There are misleading hashtags. There are secret abbreviations. I always have to be very careful to avoid using a wrong word. And the wrong word with a tag is a way worse than the wrong word alone.

Like many unusual projects, hashtagstories had big chances to fail. As the primary way to build meaning is the order of words, there is a danger a story can be misinterpreted. It’s hard to decode a story when it’s told with nouns only. I managed to write only few stories, which read as a sentence. One of the best ones is:

#iwish #iseeyou #inmyhood #beforethestorm

I have a warm feeling that I’ll stay with #hashtagstory for a long time. It’ll not be a day-to-day love. It’ll happen in bursts. But it’s good to write them. When I was publishing a book at Feedbooks, Hashtagstories Vol. 1, I’ve worked out a good, decent description of what the stories are: a literary memoir of social media trends.

Yes, this is what they are. It’ll take some time to find in them the emotions of the past. It’s not gonna take too much time, though. Social media life is changing so fast.

Last thing, I’m happy to share with you, that Hashtagstories Vol. 1, has crossed 1,000 downloads. Thank you all for showing interest and sharing #hashtagstory with your Twitter friends.

Second volume is coming soon.

Related posts

• 11.05.2009 -- A literary Project on Twitter – #hashtagstory
• 22.01.2011 -- How You Can Sell E-books to Mobile Twitter Users
• 14.05.2010 -- Fan of Twitter fiction? Check #VSS Anthology
• 23.03.2010 -- New cover of Hashtagstories Vol.1 – what do you think?
• 18.01.2010 -- One Picture Stories – Stories Pictured and Written on an iPhone

"Hashtagstories – Stories Written as a Sequence of Twitter Hashtags" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

For those who want to know, what the hash is this #hashtagstory about, please read the kick off post. The book can be downloaded from here.

Please have a look. Compare to the original one. What do you think?

Related posts

• 03.05.2010 -- Hashtagstories – Stories Written as a Sequence of Twitter Hashtags
• 02.01.2010 -- Best of #hashtagstory 2009
• 11.05.2009 -- A literary Project on Twitter – #hashtagstory
• 07.08.2011 -- Links on Mobile E-books & Self-Publishing 07.08.2011
• 20.07.2011 -- How to Create Ebook Covers with Phoster Application

"New cover of Hashtagstories Vol.1 – what do you think?" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

2009 is over. In a couple of days all traces of our last year’s activity will disappear from Twitter search results. Everybody wants to shorten a year to a couple of sentences. Same with me. And I’ll naturally do it using #hashtagstory.

As I described in a kick-off post, hashtagstories were intended to bring fiction to a new level of decoding, as every hashtag means something different for a person which is using it. One line of text means much more than just one line of text. But it took me long months to realize that there is something more about hashtagstories than just that. Those stories told with a sequence of Twitter hashtags are unexpectedly good way to describe the current state of mind of Twitterverse. In a long run they will become a literary memoir of Twitter.

So here are the best (in my opinion) hashtagstories written in 2009. Decode your own story and #enjoy

#hashtagstory :: #hello #3hotwords #3drunkwords #3wordsaftersex #bye

#hashtagstory :: #iremember #clothdiapers #thingsmummysaid #crapsuperpowers #firstrecord #goodsex #myweakness #cocaine #nothing

#hashtagstory :: #lonely #followfriday #musicmonday #ecomonday #woofywednesday #lonely

#hashtagstory :: #bestweekever #3breakupwords #alltimelow #therapist #alltimelow #therapist #alltimelow #fail

#hashtagstory :: #iwish #iseeyou #inmyhood #beforethestorm

#hashtagstory :: #love #marriage #endofstory

Related posts

• 23.03.2010 -- New cover of Hashtagstories Vol.1 – what do you think?
• 11.05.2009 -- A literary Project on Twitter – #hashtagstory
• 03.05.2010 -- Hashtagstories – Stories Written as a Sequence of Twitter Hashtags
• 15.11.2010 -- Google-translated fiction – wersja 2.0
• 27.07.2010 -- Creating One Picture Story – a Step-by-step Example

"Best of #hashtagstory 2009" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

A free cover for your book

Have you ever thought of making an e-book with your literary tweets? If you still have doubts, consider this: you can easily do it yourself, you can do it without any costs, you can use the book as a promotional tool.

Below there are tips based on my personal experience. Just make sure you’ve got a large coffee ready – and make your book happen!

How to collect a content?

Twitter search is currently showing results from 9 recent days. Nobody will find your fantastic tweet, if it’s 10 days old. 10 days means  “gone”.

It might be difficult even for yourself to collect your own Twitter stream. And here is a rescue: Tweetbook. It’s a wonderful web service, where you can make a pdf or xml file with your tweets (up to 3200). Having all of them in one editable document will make it really easy to select the golden ones – those you want in your book.

Tip: if you want to have a constant access to your tweets, you can subscribe to your Twitter profile’s feed. From now on all the updates will be collected in your RSS reader.

Where to publish?

There are a few really wonderful sites, where authors can self-publish, naming only Smashwords or Manybooks. Feedbooks is my favourite one. Here is why:

:. creating a book is extremely easy. Just copy and paste a piece of text into blog-like fields. A very useful feature is the ability to structure a book on different levels: parts, chapters, sections. If you do so, the table of content is clickable afterwards, what makes it easy to navigate through the book. This is a unique feature, I didn’t find it anywhere else

:. Feedbooks fully supports mobile reading. Major formats are ePub and mobi, what makes a book friendly for reading on cellphones and eReaders. Having in mind that Twitter is being consumed mostly from mobile Internet, it’s good to be there

:. apart from public domain books, there is a quickly growing section of original self-published books. Recently a new book list has started, 140 characters, with Twitter-based fiction. Just make sure you include “Twitter” as a tag for your book, and you’ll surely find yourself on the list.

What about a cover?

For many authors book cover seems to be a killing problem. They can’t design it themselves, they don’t know any designer, who would do it for free, they’re afraid to ask. Well, there are at least three ways to deal with that:

:. every site for self-publishers shows a default cover. At Feedbooks there is additionally a title and author’s name shown on a cover, which is a really nice feature

:. you can choose from a collection of free covers I’ve prepared for self-published Twitter authors like myself

:. as soon as you have a selection of tweets made, you can use a brilliant Wordle word cloud generator to make a cover for you. Read here how to do that.

How to benefit from a book?

As soon as your book is published, you can use it for promotional activities:

:. in addition to your current literary tweets, you can send from time to time a link to your book

:. show a book on your blog, you’re a published author, let everybody know it

:. share your book on other platforms, let it appear in as many places as possible. It’s a finished and lasting work, link to it from your profile on Posterous, Bebo, LiveJournal, even if you don’t use them frequently

:. if you want to try reaching a book agent or a publisher, having a published book is an asset. Sending an e-mail with a book attached (f.e. in pdf format) makes it more probable to draw attention

:. your book is at the same time an easily accessible archive of your best tweets. Send them again, from time to time, there might be people who didn’t discovered yet how good you are.

Note: if you’ve found this post useful, I would be grateful if you could just download my Twitter-fiction book, share it with your friends and leave a comment.

Related posts

• 12.10.2009 -- 15 Free Covers for Twitter Fiction Books
• 02.02.2011 -- Use Mobile Twitter to Discover and Instantly Buy Kindle E-books
• 22.01.2011 -- How You Can Sell E-books to Mobile Twitter Users
• 20.01.2011 -- Now Users Can Download Your Book Directly From a Tweet to Kindle for iOS
• 22.08.2010 -- Let iOS Users Download Your ePub Book Directly From a Tweet

"Publish a Book With Your Literary Tweets" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

Series 4

Series 5

“Twitter Fiction Book Cover” by Nick Name is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share alike 3.0 Unported License.

Related posts

• 15.10.2009 -- Publish a Book With Your Literary Tweets
• 03.10.2009 -- How to Turn Wordle Into an E-book Cover Generator
• 20.07.2011 -- How to Create Ebook Covers with Phoster Application
• 02.02.2011 -- Use Mobile Twitter to Discover and Instantly Buy Kindle E-books
• 22.01.2011 -- How You Can Sell E-books to Mobile Twitter Users

"15 Free Covers for Twitter Fiction Books" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Cover A

A book out of a tweet box. Simple idea, classic book design. I can make a version with strong colors as well.

Cover B

I used Wordle to generate a word cloud. In a final version there will be a cloud made from a final text of the anthology. The idea is to capture a tremendous variety of thoughts and worlds created by #VSS Authors.

I would be grateful if you leave your vote and share comments. For more info please follow @vssanthology.

Related posts

• 12.10.2009 -- 15 Free Covers for Twitter Fiction Books
• 14.05.2010 -- Fan of Twitter fiction? Check #VSS Anthology
• 15.10.2009 -- Publish a Book With Your Literary Tweets
• 03.10.2009 -- How to Turn Wordle Into an E-book Cover Generator
• 14.08.2009 -- Why #vss and #wpss are good for a writer?

"#VSS Anthology – vote for your favourite cover!" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

They make writing easier :. You are constanly inspired by all the great stories, which are accompanied by both tags. You don’t wait, you write – because you don’t want to be left behind. For a non-English writer this is also an invitation to break his limits. I skipped #twittnovel, because I realized I can’t be good at it. With literary hashtags I feel like a member of a community, the one who has to learn a lot, but also the one, who is obliged to try. As I fixed my mind on tech-absurd, I’ll write #vss and #wpss on that and only that. Maybe my English is not good enough, but I hope the stories will be interesting enough to accept my language as it is.

They promote short literature :. I greatly believe that the future of literature are short narrative forms – like the ones on Twitter. As both tags lure more and more writers and readers, they are a great way to help digital literature break into mainstream. People stop reading books, because they perceive them as time consuming. But reading a #vss can give you a similar doze of emotions. And it takes a moment – or a stream of moments.

I’ll put tech-absurdies not only on Twitter, but also here, at my blog. The full story in a title – that’s my plan. This is just a fresh idea to show, how short today’s literature can be: post title only. Check for my stories here.

And below you can read the very recent #vss and #wpss literary tweets – which in many cases are mastertweets:

Related posts

• 14.05.2010 -- Fan of Twitter fiction? Check #VSS Anthology
• 09.10.2009 -- #VSS Anthology – vote for your favourite cover!
• 16.05.2010 -- Ukazała się antologia literatury na Twitterze [notka]
• 03.05.2010 -- Hashtagstories – Stories Written as a Sequence of Twitter Hashtags
• 15.10.2009 -- Publish a Book With Your Literary Tweets

"Why #vss and #wpss are good for a writer?" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Ten wpis poświęcony jest literaturze tworzonej i publikowanej na Twitterze. Jak mam o tym nie napisać, jak wierzę w krótką formę, to raz. Uważam, że każde ograniczenie wyzwala ludzką kreatywność, to dwa. A Twitter ze swoim limitem 140 znaków przyspieszył rozwój twórczości literackiej nowego rodzaju: mikrofikcji, czy już raczej nanofikcji.

Chodzi mi o autentyczne literackie dokonania, których podstawową cechą jest to, że ponieważ mieszczą się w 140 znakach mogą być opublikowane na Twitterze. Pod opisem każdego z działań pojawiają się ostatnie wpisy. Czytajcie co się da już teraz. Wszystko zmienia w dużym tempie. Niektóre projekty prowadzone są przez kilka, kilkanaście dni (jak Poskromienie Złośnicy),  a niektórzy twórcy po prostu przestają pisać (jak @twirledview, który tworzył miniopowiadania składające się równo ze 140 znaków).

Będę nie tylko dodawał użytkowników (@), ale również hashtagi (#). Te ostatnie pozwalają szybko wyłowić wpis zawierający odpowiednią treść (w tym przypadku utwór literacki, niejednokrotnie znakomity), a pochodzące od każdego, kto chce dołączyć ze swoimi dokonaniami do tej a nie innej grupy.

Twitteratura w najczystszej postaci do przeczytania poniżej. Zapraszam:

@arjunbasu

Data dodania: 02.08.2009

Arjun Basu tworzy Twisters. To chyba najbardziej znany przykład twitteratury. Jak sama nazwa mówi, te krótkie (wiadomo) opowiastki są niezwykle intensywne, wyraziste i niejednokrotnie wywołują duże zamieszanie w umyśle czytającego. 95% wpisów na @arjunbasu to właśnie Twisters. Konto autora to przykład konsekwentnie prowadzonego i bardzo zadbanego profilu literackiego. Użytkownicy dołączają do listy czytelników po to, by regularnie sycić się mikrofikcją pierwszej klasy.

@smallstories

Data dodania: 02.08.2009

Small Stories to formy literackie o nanodługości, idealnie mieszczą się więc w limicie zadanym przez Twittera. Ich twórca, Adrian Graham, przeciera szlaki literaturze cyfrowej, a teksty pojawiające się na profilu @smallstories są tego bardzo dobrym przykładem. Te najlepsze do tej pory opublikowane stanowią treść książki Eating Grass, do ściągnięcia za darmo z Feedbooks.

#vss

Data dodania: 02.08.2009

#vss to hashtag, za którym kryje się określenie very short story. Każdy, kto publikuje na Twitterze, może opatrzyć swoje utwory takim tagiem i wszyscy, którzy “prenumerują” literaturę mikroblogową (sposób: grupy lub rss) będą dostawać je na bieżąco. #vss jest obecnie jednym z najczęściej używanych tagów, agregujących wpisy literackie. Jego twórcą i propagatorem jest @veryshortstory.

#sixwords

Data dodania: 02.08.2009

Spośród inicjatyw literackich, które zdefiniowane są za pomocą zadania do wykonania (np. one sentence story) dużą popularnością w ostatnich tygodniach cieszy się #sixwords. Ktoś mógłby zarzucić, że nie jest to literatura. Według mnie jest, chociaż prawdą jest, że six words uprawiane jest nie tylko przez ludzi, którzy świadomie zajmują się twórczością literacką. Z drugiej strony to bardzo dobrze – literatura przedostaje się dzięki temu do tych, którzy nigdy wcześniej się nią nie interesowali.

#haiku

Data dodania: 02.08.2009

Pisząc o literaturze na Twitterze herezją byłoby nie napisać o #haiku. Wpisy pojawiają się co kilka minut. Haiku to niezmiennie jeden z popularnych tematów na stronie wyszukiwania zasobów Twittera. I przykład, że niektóre formy literackie dają sobie świetnie radę w każdych okolicznościach.

#hashtagstory

Data dodania: 02.08.2009

Na koniec mój pomysł na historie opowiadane za pomocą popularnych w danej chwili hashtagów. Jest odpowiedzią na pytanie: “czy można tworzyć po angielsku bez pomocy tłumacza?”. Być może zainspiruje was do myślenia o tworzeniu utworów uniwersalnych, dostępnych dla każdego użytkownika internetu. Więcej o projekcie tutaj.

#mfic

Data dodania: 28.08.2009

#mfic to microfiction. Ciekawostką jest to, że nowy tag powstał po to, by nie dać się zlokalizować spamerom, którzy automatycznie przesyłają informacje z każdego wpisu, opatrzonego popularnym tagiem. Podejrzewam, że takim popularnym tagiem stał się #wpss. Zanim więc spam dotrze do #mfic, można się cieszyć prawie nieskażoną literaturą.

#9wordstory

Data dodania: 14.09.2009

Kolejny przykład dynamiki, z jaką rozwija się twórczość na Twitterze. Autorzy, którzy uważają, że format #sixwords się zużył, lub co bardziej prawdopodobne – jest zbyt wymagający (= zbyt krótki) – przerzucają się na mikrofikcję składającą się z dziewięciu słów.

Related posts

• 16.05.2010 -- Ukazała się antologia literatury na Twitterze [notka]
• 14.05.2010 -- Fan of Twitter fiction? Check #VSS Anthology
• 12.10.2009 -- 15 Free Covers for Twitter Fiction Books
• 15.02.2009 -- Nanopowieść “Jan i Anna”
• 03.05.2010 -- Hashtagstories – Stories Written as a Sequence of Twitter Hashtags

"Literatura na Twitterze" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.

Here it is – a Twitter literary project called #hashtagstory.

A couple of days ago I decided to stop #twitnovel. The last one I wrote is here. I realized, that as a non-English writer I would be just a 7th-or-sth-level imitator of the best Twitter writers. So I started to look for a good alternative.

And, believe me or not, this was easy. Three hints got me to the point. [1] was Boing Boing’s post on “Remix the Remixer” competition, where the task is to mash up any of Lawrence Lessig’s existing work and create something new, unique and creative. [2] was my two-weeks old (=outdated) idea to make a Twitter story out of url shortened links (#urlstory). I’ve been pretty enthusiastic about that – for two hours. A need for an extensive web search to find great sites to be #urlstory’s heroes – this was too much. [3] was Twitter Magnets – a beautiful site where from random words you can create a 140-character poem and send it to Twitter.

This was leading my mind to a single morning coffee conclusion: you don’t have to write down words to create something new and meaningful. You can use the existing ones. We are living in the times of over-content. Maybe instead of adding up it’s good to mash up.

My first #hashtagstory has already landed in Twitterland. It’s ironic, that’s my style:

This was fast. So to be sure nothing escapes, please spend some more time to read “how” and “why”.

How am I doing this?

hashtag mash-up :. As you see the idea is pretty simple – I’m mashing up a few hashtags into a tweet, trying to tell a story.

trendy hashtags :. I’ll try to use as much trendy hashtags as possible. It’s always a way to get a bigger response than trying to draw attention to #goognology.

at least one story a week :. I’ll be delivering at least one #hashtagstory a week, at Sundays. Weekend is good for writing, reading and in my case – hashtagtelling.

Why am I doing this?

new area to explore :. I’m a tech-absurdist. I love technology and at the same time I hate it. With my projects I’m trying to find new ways for literature to express – and all the recent achievements of technology can be useful here. Today’s writer should try to expand into fields never explored before – and prove that technology is no limit for a man.

new dimension to hypertext :. hashtag is a next generation link. So far we had a hypertext literature leading from one single place to another single place. With hashtags you can open an almost endless world of associations and relations. Especially that one single hashtag means something different for anyone who is using it.

the sequence is back :. I’ve been always under a great influence of a story being told by a sequence. Those two stories are not the same: [1] #iPhone #mother #wishes [2] #mother #wishes #iPhone. With a task limited to selecting popular hashtags from the Twitter stream the biggest challenge is to build an interesting story by putting all elements in the right order.

flash fiction is the future :. extremely short pieces of writing are the ones to bring a lot of fresh air into literature. Nanofiction is for me the future of fiction. The new generation of readers is distracted by too many things, the attention span gets shorter and shorter. 5 000 words for a continuous reading – no chance. That’s why any idea to close a story in fewer words is worth considering.

a next step in “write less, tell more” :. this time the simple character, which is pushing the thing forward is “#”. I love it.

language is not a limit :. I’m a Polish writer. I’m not good enough to write short stories by myself in English. But Twitter is such a fantastic place, where you can feel free to create and share what you feel is your best. And find a best way to do it. I’m not good enough for #twitnovel, but I’m good enough for #hashtagstory.

PS. 25 best hashtagstories are published as a book at Feedbooks.

Related posts

• 03.05.2010 -- Hashtagstories – Stories Written as a Sequence of Twitter Hashtags
• 24.04.2010 -- Looking for a partner to co-create avatar stories
• 23.03.2010 -- New cover of Hashtagstories Vol.1 – what do you think?
• 02.01.2010 -- Best of #hashtagstory 2009
• 14.05.2010 -- Fan of Twitter fiction? Check #VSS Anthology

"A literary Project on Twitter – #hashtagstory" is a post from Password Incorrect Blog.