Cloud Atlas author embraces Twitter to tease audience and promote upcoming novel

David Mitchell – the writer behind the beautifully disjointed Cloud Atlas – will release 140-character sized chunks of a new short story through Twitter in a digital ploy to promote his latest (and  more substantial) novel.

The British author will tweet snippets of The right sort, a short story designed to create a buzz around his latest novel – The Bone Clocks. 

Set in 1978, it follows the story of a teenage boy who discovers valium which makes him think in tweet-sized chunks. It will be pushed through the authors personal Twitter account, in a series of 20-tweet instalments over the next seven days.

The Right Sort is a stand alone work as Mitchell does not think it would be fair to expect people to buy his new book to make sense of it.

“But it is set in the same universe where possibly the clause of mortality that is written into the contract of life is negotiable,” he said.

Mitchell is one of the most high-profile authors to publish a story on Twitter, which  is nurturing a growing sub-genre dubbed “Twitterfiction”, highlighting the endless possibilities that social tools offer the marketing community.