Author Launches New Twitter Experiment

Bristol, VA, April 01, 2009 --(PR.com)-- Cozy mystery author Gayle Trent is trying something new on Twitter. She has been enjoying the communication and tips garnered from the social networking tool Twitter; but when she recently learned of Twitter Tales, short stories contained within Twitter's 140 character limit, she started thinking of another way authors could use the site to introduce their work to new readers.

Each day, Trent will post a series of 140-character excerpts from her out-of-print novella Between A Clutch and A Hard Place on Twitter. The excerpts will flow together to form a paragraph. The excerpts will contain the hashtag #novella so Twitter followers can read previous excerpts or see the link to Trent's blog (http://gayle24202.tripod.com/gaylesblog/) which will contain the chapter from which the excerpts were taken. Trent intends to display the entire novella at her blog a chapter a week. If the experiment is successful, Trent intends to repeat the process with some of her other out-of-print works.

Between A Clutch and A Hard Place is a comedic mystery nominated for the 2005 Appalachian Book of the Year award. The main character is sassy, sixty-something sleuth Myrtle Crumb. When Myrtle buys a purse at a consignment shop and finds a cryptic note inside, she is compelled to determine what happened to the purse's previous owner.

"It's just something fun I thought I'd try," says Trent. "People are always asking me, 'What else have you written?' This way, they can read some of my prior works while waiting on the next books."

Trent is currently at work on Dead Pan, the sequel to Murder Takes the Cake, and The Quick and The Thread, a new cozy mystery commissioned by NAL to be written under the pseudonym Amanda Lee.

For more information, contact Gayle Trent at gd830@hotmail.com or via Twitter @GayleTrent.

###