CELL PHONES: THE NEW PUBLISHER

Brittney Sloan & Christine Vanasse

WHAT IS A CELL PHONE NOVEL?

keitai shosetsu

Written on handsets

Short chapters (100-200 words)

Diary like stories

Predominantly dialogue

Simple language

Textspeak/emoticons

Predictable plot

HISTORY

Japan

“Deep Love” by Yoshi in 2000

First mobile website

Publishing companies and agencies picked up on

the trend

Maho no i-rando (Magic Island)

AUTHORS AND READERS

First-time writers

Young female readers and writers

Teens and twenties

Use pennames

PLOT

Partially autobiographical

Taboo subjects

Drugs, sex, pregnancy, abortion, rape and disease

POPULARITY

Increases cell phone ownership/usage

Unlimited data plans

Publishing opportunities

Long commutes

Privacy

New era of expression

CRITICISM

Poor literature quality

Should be classified with comic books or popular music

The Web is more of a conversation. Books are more

one-way

Writing can be brought online in a form that will

invigorate traditional authors, hobby writers, young

authors, and even people who have never really thought

of writing anything more than a diary blog.

The unseen or omitted becomes a vital part of the reading experience, allowing deeper meanings and interpretations to unfold.

Weight of individual words

Power of cutting

Teenage fad

SPREAD

Asia, Europe, South Africa

www.textnovel.com

Similar themes as Japan

THE FUTURE?

New era of minimalism, art, and expression?

Could the education system use these concepts to

encourage interest in different forms of literature

and a new way of expression?

WHAT IS A TWITTER NOVEL?

Content that is published 140 characters at a time.

A writer can go from final draft to publication in

seconds.

Twitter novels incorporate and exploit all the

current features of social media to develop followers.

The novels can make extensive use of links to

photos, videos and websites.

Tweets are archived off the Twitter platform, so that

readers may access the novel in full without having to

scroll back through tweets to find the beginning.

Twitter novels are normally abbreviated so that each

post is as self-contained and interesting as a complete

scene or short poem.

Tweets are often scheduled to appear at regular

intervals to best reach all followers.

The novels make use of hashtags, such

as #twitternovel to find common readers.

WHY TWITTER NOVELS?

They are appealing because it can potentially

reach and build a large audience quickly. As with

conventional novels, this audience must be

developed, and in some cases an author can find a

large audience quickly through word of mouth and

viral sharing.

HOW TO START A TWITTER NOVEL

Pick a topic/story line

Decide how you want to format it

Make sure you have a set plot

Make concise sentences that move the story

forwards• NO FILLERS

FORMATTING

Story in chunks - A single author builds the story post

by post.  He or she may already have a manuscript, but

it gets chunked out a 140 or fewer characters at a time. 

Single post, single story – The ultra compressed

novel.  An example is novelsin3lines by Félix Fénéon. 

Collaborative story seeds -A starting post, followed by a sequence of  Twitter posts contributed by followers. 

Author Neil Gaiman kicked off the novel with the post:  Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, “We don’t love you anymore.” 

Thousands of people have responded with the next possible sentences. 

TWITTER NOVEL TIPS

1. Throw Out The Manuscript

Twitter is instantaneous. Serializing a manuscript may be easy, but trying

to contract and make logical sense of it in 140 character bursts is not.

2. Have A Plan

Although there’s no need for a manuscript, you should know where the

story is going. The formatting for a scene provides more freedom to work

within the spaces you’ve created and allow the story to grow naturally.

3. Manage The Clock

What’s great about a Twitter novel is that your content is no

longer static. Depending on how committed you are, you could

have events happen in real time using services like Tweetlater.

4. Not Just Story. Events

If a character is mugged at 6am, you could post a police

announcement on the Twitter novel looking for the perpetrator.

What are the characters listening to on the radio? Is someone

calling them that’s important to the story? Use Twitpic to show a

photo of one of your friends or an actor to show the reader who is

calling or what the mugger looks like.

5. Don’t Bury The Lead

More than five Twitter posts on any given day can be

dangerous. You’ll induce reader fatigue, and new

readers will get lost quickly.

There’s an assumption that many of your Twitter

followers will enjoy your work while on the go, so their

time to take in a novel may be limited to short bursts.

6. Move It Forward

Simply put: Each tweet should move the story

forward in some way. If it doesn’t, cut it.

7. Newbies And Greenhorns

Finally, you may have readers follow you after the

novel has started. Include link on your Twitter page

of a home page. Occasionally remind readers on days

that you do not update that they can catch up at this

website.

The format is still new, but it won’t be long until we start to

read about successful Twitter novelists getting publishing

deals. Why? A large following equates to a large potential

customer base. If you can show you have a customer base,

you are better positioned to land a book deal.

So far, publishers aren’t lining up to sign Twitter novelists. 

But as the medium evolves, it could become a good place to

try out story ideas and see what can build a following. 

Japanese cell phone novelists have shown that novels in short

bites can be successful. 

JAPANESE SUCCESS

Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of

sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.

One such star, a woman named Rin, wrote “If You” over a six-month stretch

during her senior year in high school. While commuting to her part-time job or

whenever she found a free moment, she tapped out passages on her cellphone and

uploaded them on a popular Web site for would-be authors.

After cellphone readers voted her novel No. 1 in one ranking, her story of the

tragic love between two childhood friends was turned into a 142-page hardcover

book. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007.

“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the

cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara,

an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University

who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the

course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the

cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”

Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written

fiction before, and many of their readers had never

read novels before, according to publishers.

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