3 Minute Stories – a smart, 2.0 idea to promote books

For a 2.0 writer like me, this idea is tremendously inspiring: Adrian Graham has started to record his nanofiction stories, using AudioBoo. They are called 3 Minute Stories, and by now already seven of them are available from Graham’s Digital Fiction profile.

AudioBoo is a Twitter-like social site, giving a possibility to send boos – easily recorded sound messages (one could say: tweets have eventually found their voice). In fact there are many similarities. It’s all about sharing quick information bits. You can easily operate from a mobile. You can follow and be followed. And last but not least: there is a limit technology gives to a human: 3 minutes of recording, not a second longer.

And similarly to the boost of creativity, aggravated by Twitter’s 140-character limit, same will happen with 3 minutes here. Or, to be precise – it happens right now. 3 Minute Stories are a great example of that. They are an audio version of the perfect nanofiction stories from The Revelation: And a Hundred Other Stories, a book wire-published by Graham and available from mo-book sites like Feedbooks.

Now it’s time for the inspiration part. Writing doesn’t make sense, when there’s no reading. Writing 2.0 is about finding wired readers. You can use your blog (how outdated), Facebook, Twitter. Or you can try something new. It’s the nature of 2.0 writing and publishing – if you’re not in on time, you’re out. AudioBoo is new and promising. For a writer an audiobook was always an interesting option – a promise to reach the reader with a more attractive and less attention-grabbing form. Now with AudioBoo you can easily create a mini audiobook, and what’s most important – instantly deliver to your audience.

Graham’s 3 Minute Stories have inspired me to try AudioBoo. I believe in short fiction. It’s the future. People are distracted by so many things, that focusing on one activity for half an hour seems to be impossible these days. A 500-page, hard cover book is really scary for me. How can I find time to read it? But there’s always time for a short YouTube video. So why not spending a couple of minutes to read a book?