Cheap Viagra and Brief Narrative: Together at Last

Forget Brevity‘s 750 word limit, or Twitter stories.  Here’s an even more extreme form of narrative, from matchbook. Stories (true or fiction) no more than 70 characters long, to be distributed across the internet as Google ads.

Here are some details, and a link for more information:

The experiment: publish very tiny stories in the form of Google Ads found next to search results and on websites in an attempt to use the advertising system to work for art rather than against it.

… Say you search for short story in Google. You receive the results of your search. Alongside the results are one or more ads that have been linked with the search term short story. Now imagine that instead of an ad for some dubious literary agency next to your search results, you saw a very short story. Maybe two. They might look something like this:

Ted’s Important Shoelace

Ted met Sara on a run. They married

and later divorced over some words.

By Author Name

If the ad was clicked it would bring the clicker to matchbook.

HOWEVER: the purpose here is not to click your ad story. This is how the ads cost us money: per click. Instead the point is to litter the internet with stories where stories have not previously been. It is not entirely helpful to send your friends to click on your ad story, but by all means, they should do searches and see if they can spot it.

To submit: these ads are very particular and not flexible in the space given. This is where you come in. Stories must follow these requirements:

(character count includes spaces):

Title: No more than 25 characters

Line 1: No more than 35 characters

Line 2: No more than 35 characters

Byline: Your name

The byline will only be used for your name, but you may use the title as a part of your story, provided it can stand alone as the title.

That’s 70 total characters for the story not including the title—half that of Twitter fiction. Oh dear.

Full Submission Guidelines here.