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Behind-The-Books Blog
Mobile phone novelists
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
Today I read in The Metro about a new species of novel – the mobile phone novel, or, to give it its correct Japanese name - keitai shousetsu. These novels are basically short stories people can read on their mobile phones, which sounds simple enough and perhaps that’s the beauty of them – their accessibility to people of all ages and reading abilities. As they are designed to be read on small mobile phone screens, the authors tend to keep their language succinct (though not to the point of text-speak), focusing on dialogue and emotions rather than long descriptions.
These little beasties are taking the Japanese reading market by storm, with some titles being read by over three million people. The most successful, and the one that started the craze, was written by a Japanese barman and focuses on the dangers of drug addiction. Other popular novels are romances and teen fiction (girls of thirteen to eighteen make up seventy per cent of the keitai novel audience) and keitai novelists are gaining huge fanbases before the conventional publishing industry even knows who they are! Apparently, whilst some of the keitai novels have been made into normal books, other published authors are now spurning conventional writing techniques to become mobile-phone novelists. And the craze – following in sudoku’s footsteps – is set to come this way…
Whilst I can’t see any of our best-loved authors exchanging the keyboard for a mobile, I can imagine my teenage niece and nephew happily swapping the latest story on the mobiles they have permanently fixed to their hands, so who knows?
This little article fascinated me. First there was the pen, then the printed word, next came blogs and e-books, and now we have novels written specifically for mobile phones. The development of technology has such a great impact on the way we write and read literature - who can tell what will come next…? If anyone knows it’s bound to be George Friedman. A quick flick through his upcoming book The Next 100 Years – A Forecast for the 21st Century might just reveal the answers!
Louise Watson, Editor
Hi There,
Informative! i’ll definately return in future 
G
Posted on May 11th, 2009 at 9:18 pmLeave a Comment
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