Quick Lit

On an otherwise uneventful summer morning in 2003 I sat down in front of my computer and started writing a short story. After 30 minutes of typing I was done. I sent the story to a friend and went about my day.

The next morning I woke up, stared into a blank screen and wrote another story. The morning after I did the same.

This went on for a 146 consecutive days, at the end of which I had written Nanotales, my first book - http://www.nanotales.net

I never intended to write a book. I always found it incredibly hard to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time and I knew, from reading about the art of writing, that books aren't written during coffee breaks. Most authors wake up in the morning and go to work. They write for 8 or 9 hours and then they go home.

And so once the book was written, I had no intentions of publishing it and never got around to looking for an agent.

About a year later, I met up with a director friend of mine for coffee. I told him about a few eBooks I had just finished (one on innovation, the other on future trends) and he asked whether it was cool to send these to a publisher he knew.

Next thing I know, I get a call from the publisher...

"I like the way you write," he said, "but I don't do business publishing. Have you ever written anything else?"

"Emmm, I've written a few short stories..." I muttered, disappointed. "Well, send them over," he said.

To cut a short story even shorter, I sent him my stories and Nanotales, a collection of 83 short short stories, came out in February 2007.

There was a bit of a media frenzy when the book came out. Traditionally, there's no market for short stories. Bookstores don't sell them, so people don't buy them, so publishers don't publish them. There was also a lot of talk about whether literature as we know it is dying (reading stats in the UK for teenagers are dismal).

The most common question I got asked in interviews was whether I thought Nanotales and its kin would kill traditional, long-form writing. Clearly, the answer is no. But if people have less and less free time on their hands, why isn't the publishing world adapting and giving them what they want, instead of whining about the future of the book?"

That ticked off a few people, but I love reading novels. I just finished Sarah Gruen's Water for Elephants and I'm loving Khaled Hosseini's new book. But what's wrong with providing the attention deficit audience a fast, quality literary experience (assuming, of course, you think what I wrote is quality...).

Increasingly, all sorts of experiences are being programmed by the people formerly known as "the audience" and increasingly it is they, and not the traditional gatekeepers of culture, who are now defining what "quality" means.

Ziv Navoth is a London-based writer, consultant and trend spotter