Cloud Atlas Author David Mitchell Publishes Book on Twitter

For a person without a Twitter account, David Mitchell would seem an unlikely candidate to be among the few high-profile authors to publish his work on the micro-blogging site - but that is exactly what he is doing with his new short story The Right Sort.

Mitchell, the author of works such as Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumn of Jacob de Zoet, has created a Twitter account (@David_Mitchell) just for the purpose, and on Monday morning began publishing the work in a series of 140-character tweets.

Mitchell published the first 18 tweets on Monday and twice a day for the rest of the week the Irish-based author will send out clusters of about 20 tweets which will represent the entirety of his new work.

While the short story is a new work in itself, the publication of The Right Sort on Twitter is part of a promotion campaign for Mitchell's new novel called The Bone Clocks which is being launched in September.

"Ocean of trivia and irrelevance"

"I'm not really a social media animal," he told the BBC. "I like my privacy. I don't want to make public the ante-rooms of my mind. I don't want to add to this ocean of trivia and irrelevance, it's already vast and deep enough."

The Right Sort is set in 1978 and is narrated by a teenager who discovers Valium. Mitchell says that the story represents the time when the protagonist is " tripping out" on the drug, delivering the story in "a sequence of nice little throbs and pulses - those are the tweets. He's basically thinking in tweets because of the Valium."

Previously, authors like Neil Gaiman, Melvin Burgess, Jennifer Egan and Philippa Gregory have all published works on Twitter.