For the ninth-and-a-half entry to What Would Twitter Do? I interviewed my favourite corporate account: Melville House, which not only has a smart, fun and lively Twitter account, but is one of the most exciting and brilliant English-language publishers. My questions about their feed were answered by Alex Shephard, Melville House’s Director of Digital Marketing and founding editor of Full Stop (he is also a former bookseller for McNally Jackson and BookCourt) and Zeljka Marosevic, managing director of Melville House UK and one of The Bookseller’s 2014 Rising Stars.

– Sheila Heti

SHEILA HETI: I love what Melville House publishes and how Melville House appears online. Was there even an in-house discussion of the tone Melville House would take in its tweets, or are you both just being you?

ALEX SHEPHARD: Zeljka and I write most of the feed now; Dennis Johnson, Melville House’s publisher, also chimes in, as do some others. Melville House is a pretty collaborative place. Zeljka and I started a day apart last March. She started a day before me, something I’ll never forgive her for. Before that the Twitter feed was mostly Dustin Kurtz, who recently left the company to be a dad. I don’t remember ever really having a discussion about tone—when I started it felt a little like getting the keys to your parents’ car when you’re sixteen—but for me, the voice comes from two places. One is our blog, MobyLives, which was started by our publisher, Dennis Johnson, in 1998 (it predates the publishing house by a few years). That blog, which I currently edit, covers the publishing industry from inside in a way that’s insightful, humorous, and occasionally indignant—we stand up for what we believe in, but we try to do it in a way that’s fun and self-aware. The other is Dustin, who really helped build the account into what it is before Zeljka and I made it much better last spring. (Just kidding, Dustin! I love you.) Zeljka and I bring different things to the table, but we have similar senses of humor—we’re sarcastic and wry and like doing silly stunts. And what you see from the account is similar to what you see on the blog—I’m representing the company, but I’m also representing myself. Mostly I’m just trying to make people laugh. And buy our books, so I can keep goofing off on Twitter.

ZELIKA MARSEVIK: I remember an early email exchange when I started at Melville House which went something like,“easy on the exclamation marks, keep it interesting… you know the drill.” So it was more implicit than an actual conversation but there was immediately a sense of trust, which...