QUILLBLOG

Author tweets his way back into the limelight

Author and former New Yorker staff writer Dan Baum is attracting attention with an essay about his tenure at the prestigious magazine in that he’s posting on Twitter. Baum began his story this past Friday and has been gaining followers ever since, with 200 new readers joining in a two-hour period this morning. At the time of this writing, Baum is up to 1,411 followers.

Baum’s essay details his hiring (and firing) from The New Yorker and features many tidbits about his career in between, including links to stories he pitched but were never printed, information about his salary, and his commitment not to write for competing magazines such as Harper’s, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine.

What the L.A. Times‘ Jacket Copy blog cleverly points out, however, is that the timing of Baum’s “big reveal” is rather suspect, considering he left The New Yorker back in 2007. Carolyn Kellogg writes:

It could be a Twitter experiment. It reads like a short essay that’s been chopped into 140-character bits (in a few places, sentences stretch across two tweets). Or maybe he’s promoting something. Could he have a book out?

In fact, he does. Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans was well-reviewed when it was released in February. It’s doing pretty well on Amazon (No. 1 in the subcategories of histories/Louisiana and biographies and memoirs/regional U.S./South). But it’s hard for a book to stay top of mind after the first flurry of attention.

While this Quillblogger is a fan of Twitter, this voyeuristic exposition sure doesn’t help counter the arguments that the site’s main use is for self-serving promotion.

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