What is micro-storytelling? I've now come across this term multiple times and it's unclear to me what it means. Most recently, I saw it used within the context of twitter stories, the building of stories based on short individual entries by different writers over a period of time (check out The New Digital Storytelling blog). This is a form of collaborative writing that is best used in the classroom and as a tool for sparking creative writing. I don't know of many examples though where it has led to the creation of an actual commercial product. 
When I googled the term, I came across this interesting article from Teach Digital. In it, the author Matthew Wordwood describes the telling of a story in incrementally small segments. He has some great suggestions of apps that help writers create 50 to 100 word stories. Why would you ever want to do this? For starters, it is a good exercise that gets your creative writing juices flowing. Also, if you work in marketing or publicity, getting your key branding and messaging in a short and engaging format is critical to capturing those much wanted consumers. 

In wikipedia, you can find the terms Flash Fiction and Micro Fiction defined as "a style of fictional literature or fiction of extreme brevity." As an exercise, I recommend trying to remove all the parts of a story that can remain hidden yet understood or implied in the narrative. It's a great editorial exercise that will lead to stronger more engaging stories whether they be long- or short- form

With the so called Attention Economy driving readers to short-form content and the countless twitter and status updates, I'm not surprised if more platforms pop-up that provide tools for either collaborations or aggregations of stories based on micro-writing. Imagine an instant-roulette of story ideas curated by self-interest search terms. I think we will see this skill set develop more over the next few years. 

The MIT Open Documentary Lab is doing a series of interviews with some top talented multi-media storytellers. It is a fabulous line-up, so check it out, here. 
In the latest round, they have interviewed Elaine McMillion, who can only be described as an upcoming multi-media documentarist. Coming from video-first, McMillion is developing a talent for bringing to live contemporary social issues via multiple media formats including audio-visual, images, and social media. Check out her interview here. And to see her work, Hollow.


*Disclosure, Both Elaine and I attended Emerson, one of the best media colleges in the US (IMHO).

Serial publishing or episodic publishing is a form of storytelling made up of contained units of content with individual story arcs distributed over set periods of time, with an overarching story arc that bookends the entire experience. In the past, magazines and newspapers were the primary publishers of serial content and more recently radio and television have perfected the format with audio/visual tools and global distributions. 
One of the benefits of serial publishing is the ongoing commitment of fans and readers as the story progresses. Fans ongoing commitment only grows as the amount of time they give to the development of the characters, week by week or month by month. Understanding how to keep the momentum of the story is critical to maintaining high engagement with new and returning fans.
Recently, novelist Hugh Howey appears to have done just that with his novel Wool. Howey self-published Wool as a series of short novellas to Amazon's Kindle.  Apparently, this was enough to grow an audience that then led to some lucrative licenses in 24 countries, a print publishing deal with Simon&Schuster and a movie deal to boot. Well done Mr. Howey. 
To learn more about his story, check out his post at HuffingtonPost, here.