SXSW 1 - Spicy Huevos

So I'm not going to moan about the jetlag or the 12 hour cattle class flight, because I'm in Austin Texas for the South by Southwest interactive festival (conference? happening?) and I know that this makes me a very lucky digital publisher. Especially as I have left behind the chaos of the office move

I hit the ground running last night meeting up with another olde-worlde book type who is launching his book on email gone wrong here at the convention. 8am saw me having the first of I hope many mexican meals at Las Manitas, lining my stomach with spicy Heuvos before the panels and trade show started.

I'll blog about the panels later, but you might be wondering what a representative of a traditional old-media publishing company is doing at a 'geekfest' in Texas. Well, if you've been following the Penguin Blog you'll know that we are dipping our toes (and sometimes just diving straight into) the new-media waters with projects like Penguin in Second Life, the recent wikinovel, the podcast and of course this blog. And rather than sit on the fence and wait until perhaps it is too late, we're trying to see whether we can use online tools and 'the social web' to create conversations about books, about authors, about writing and about Penguin, obviously hoping that this will ultimately lead to people reading and buying more of our books!

So I'm here to meet the people creating the second wave of the the internet, here some views on the trends that are shaping the culture and hopefully find some good ideas to adapt/borrow/steal. The first trend I've spotted so far is that everyone is using and talking about Twitter, a blogging, networking, IMing mashup. My phone is buzzing every 60 seconds with a twitter from someone in the convention centre filling me (and the world) on what they are up to right this moment. We've had the wikinovel - is the world ready for the first Twitter novel?

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

 

PS the wise people over at Booksquare posted a much better argument for why publishers should attend tech events such as SXSW here.

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Comments

[zooba book blogger]

SXSW's lineup is fantastic this year! Any literary happenings at the festival?

[Sean McMinn]

A twitter novel is an interesting idea, and I started one late Aprile to experiment with the idea.

If interested you can check it out at: http://twitter.com/talesofdismay

It's actually quite difficult to do.

[dave kees]

I think a Twitter novel is a great idea. Something like that was actually Hunter S. Thompson's dream when he wrote Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.

But it should be something done as real-time stream of consciousness. I think that is what is missing from your experimental novel.