nano write mobile

The Japanese have taken to composing novels on their cell phones.

Keitai shousetsu are novels composed for and on mobile phones, and they’re big in Japan right now. I mean, really big. Of the 10 best selling novels in Japan over the first half of 2007, 5 were originally composed on cellular phones and they sold an average of 400,000 copies each. One of the best selling was “Koizora” (Love Sky), by a woman whose nom-de-plume is Mika. Koizora follows the rather twisted story of a high school girl who is raped and becomes pregnant, has sold 1.2 million copies in the past 14 months, and was recently made into a movie.

To put that in perspective, US Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s book “Leadership,” for which he received a $3 million advance, has sold just 836,000 copies since 2002.

the topic material is predictably teen-oriented, but the general idea is one that I find quite compelling, to be honest. It occurred to me that Twitter was the perfect vehicle to try something like this out – and sure enough, behold Twittories. The first one, called “A Darkness Inside” suffers from arbitrarily collaborative rules, but there’s nothing stopping someone from using the personal Twitter account in much the same way for a solo opus.

And in fact, I’m gonna give it a whirl. I have no plot, no character, and no theme. But I’m getting started anyway. Feel free to follow along (and ignore my occasional Starbucks post)!

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