Please Welcome Annabelle Gurwitch to Twitter!

I met Annabelle Gurwitch a few years back during an interview for GalleyCat about Fired!, a documentary that incorporated both her own experiences being fired from an acting job and the stories of others that then became a book. Last year, I met her husband, Jeffrey Kahn, when the two of them came to the 92nd St Y Tribeca to perform a dramatic dialogue about their romance and marriage—as I said at the time, it was like Love Letters, with more laughs. Now the performance piece has become a book, too, and to promote You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up, Annabelle is getting over her resistance to Twitter to co-tweet with Jeff and keep the dialogue going. Here’s how she came to her decision…

In the run up to the publication of our book, my husband/co-author and I have been encouraged to embrace a variety of promotional schemes, including a twitter campaign. I don’t want to sound like a Luddite, but I am a tad resistant, so I’ve compiled these objections in the following listicle which I will be linking to my Facebook page and adding to my RSS feed on my blog on The Huffington Post.

1. I write first person essays. If I am twittering approximately one hundred and forty characters, something in the neighborhood of nineteen words a tweet, maybe five times daily, in six days I will have used up enough material for one essay—in less than a year, two books worth of words and ideas. Not only will I not have anything left to write about, but who will pay to read my writing if they’ve followed my twitters all year long?

2. “Sound like yourself” was the sage advice Kurt Vonnegut penned in 1999 to aspiring writers. Andy Borowitz is perhaps the writer who comes to mind as most successfully marrying his unique talents with the medium. Every day he entertains 11,259 Twitter followers, 5,000 Facebook friends, and tens of thousands of blog readers with his pithy observations, including many well under the limit of 140 characters. (“Lou Dobbs Returns to His Planet; ‘My Work Here is Done'”) His events regularly sell out, but can I successfully craft such a distinctive style in time for publication? Perhaps I’ll have to think really out of the box, like one of my favorite writers, Mark Danielewski, whose debut tweet read: “NAM Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις.”

3. What is the role of a writer in our society? I keep thinking of Robert Frost’s inspirational advocacy of taking the road less traveled. At this critical juncture in our nation’s history, shouldn’t we, as a community, be encouraging more leaders and fewer followers?

4. What Would Derrida Do? I often look to Jacques Derrida for direction. Also Matt and Trey from South Park. Stone and Parker aren’t tweeting at this time; Jacques Derrida, on the other hand, might have had a field day with twitter. After all, is there a greater illustration of deconstructionism than Lindsay Lohan’s tweet at 1 a.m. on November 10th, 2009: “xoxoxo”? Is Lelo intimating that communications can be boiled down to sending “love & kisses”? Or does her usage of HTML signify some other meaning (140 characters)?

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking. Right now, my husband has exactly 23 followers on Twitter, but the article we penned for Marie Claire will reach hundreds of thousands of readers and then will hopefully be read by many more in doctor’s offices, salons and reception areas for countless months to come. Wouldn’t we be better off trying to attract readers through the traditional media instead of striving to engage with them in our own newly minted much smaller distribution stream?

If you twitter and no one is following you, have you actually tweeted? Is there anything sadder than twittering alone in cyberspace? Almost as sad as writing a book if no one reads it.

Actual data supporting the link between book sales and social media is still in the earliest stages of being collated. The case study our publicist forwarded us was an article from Dosh Dosh, a popular web blog about internet and social media marketing, which advocated Twitter as a way to obtain a book contract. Dan Brown twittered but only attracted a little over 5,000 followers—compared to Ashton Kutcher’s legions, whose number (approximately 4 million) equals the population of Melbourne, Australia—and he still managed to sell a million copies of The Lost Symbol the first day it went on sale. But if your last book didn’t feature a conspiracy in the Vatican, or vampires, and you weren’t on the Republican ticket in the last election or didn’t overhear conversations about the candidate running on the Republican ticket, you will find yourself doing just about anything you can think of attract readers.

Most likely, this is just simply the natural progression of “stuff authors do to sell books.” Moving your book to the front of a brick and mortar store? Been there, done that. Exhorting friends to write reviews of your book on Amazon? Guilty. Friending someone on Facebook to gain exposure on their news feeds? I’m not answering that unless you do. Doing something you’ve publicly denounced? In 2005, I derided what I labeled the relentless chatter on “the blah blah blogosphere” on NPR. Less than a year later I was blogging to promote Fired!

The good news for our publisher is that my husband actually enjoys Twitter and is a Facebook fanatic. I guess that’s why they call it having a better half. Thank God I married him. My husband Jeff tweeted the following on November 16th: “my wife. before she joins Twitter she’s writing an article about how against it she is.” He actually started tweeting to me a few weeks ago, but in the madness of our daily two working parent household, he forgot to tell me, so it was a one sided tweetversation—oh, the challenges of writing with your spouse! We begin tweeting in tandem on February 1st, and we invite you to follow us.

1 February 2010 | guest authors |