Last week, MediaBistro hosted Electric Literature co-founder Scott Lindenbaumm to discuss the recent Rick Moody Twitter disaster, which we covered in an earlier report here. The upshot: the magazine actually thinks their experiment (publishing a new Moody story on Twitter) worked pretty well, despite a backlash against the project from what Lindenbaumm called the “publishing and media community.” In the interview with GalleyCat’s Jason Boog, Lindenbaumm claims that the worst technical flaw of the project–wherein users got Moody’s story in multiple Twitter feeds, via Twitter “co-publishers”–affected only a  handful of people… though this audience turned out to be mainly journalists who cover the media business (and thus follow a number of literary institutions, like bookstores and magazines), and the same people who wrote critical articles about the project.

According to the GalleyCat interview, the project was successful in gathering new followers for the magazine (which added 10,000 Twitter followers in a few days), and readership for Moody’s story: the Electric Literature editor noted that Moody remained pleased with the experiment, saying “This kind of readership, this potential readership is something a short story I’ve written hasn’t had for a very very long time, if ever.”  The magazine also played down the rush to criticize the project: “All of a sudden, the experiment went from ‘cool’ to ‘troubled’ ‘failure’ to ‘utter failure’ in these peoples’ perspectives–despite the fact that 32,000 people saw it on Twitter with a ten-to-one positive ratio of comments. Of the 32,000 probably a couple hundred at most [had Twitter frustrations] but that became the coverage of the story.”