Keitai Novels to Print Books: Emergent Storytelling
By Robert Nagle
Yoko Hani on how stories on mobile phones are making it into bookstores:
Amazingly, in fact, out of the top 10 bestselling fiction works in the first half of 2007, five began life as keitai novels, according to Nippan. And with average book sales of about 400,000 copies each, these bestsellers are breaking entirely new ground in the book industry. For one thing, most of the authors have no professional background as novelists. Then, in terms of the format, these books are written from left to right and top to bottom of the page, as opposed to the traditional Japanese writing style that flows vertically from right to left.
Keitai novelists get started not out of a burning literary desire, but a desire for acceptance in the community:
Mobile-phone book editors attribute the novels’ popularity to the fact that they fit the lifestyle of high-school girls and women in their 20s. This demographic not only habitually communicate by typed keitai messages, but also read on their small screens while on the train, at home or anywhere. As well, keitai-novel sites have become the nodes of a community by making it possible for users to have interactions together and access a huge number of titles. Writers, too, can have easy access to readers’ responses and then draw on them to further develop their stories.
“An interesting aspect of keitai novels is that readers and writers often overlap. In many cases, readers who were inspired by stories on the sites have started writing by themselves,” said Mayumi Sato, an editor at Goma Books, which published three of the five bestselling keitai books in the first half of this year.
“Keitai-novel writers do not necessarily have an idea that they want to be a novelist.
“Rather, they start writing because they want to join the community of keitai writers and readers,” she explained.
Yoko Hani quots Koichiro Tomioka about the phenomenon:
In the conventional system, would-be novelists submit their stories to literature magazines in the hope of being published and recognized as new writers — and hopefully win prizes for their work. Consequently, editors and publishers are involved in the process by which new novelists emerge.
But in significant contrast, Tomioka said, mobile-phone novels are often born without being exposed to the eyes of any professionals and become popular first with readers.
“It’s an interesting system,” he said. “But novels born out of the new process can have amateurish aspects. The issue is whether this new type of writer can keep on writing works as a professional novelist.”
(Thanks, Literary saloon) But how revolutionary is this movement –especially when compared to the West?
It’s easy to overlook the effect mass transit has on reading habits. Without the Japanese subways, it’s hard to predict whether people would find time for these things.
People in the west are already blogging and youtubing, so user-created content is not that unusual. Many bloggers have adopted fictional personas to the point where following them is almost like following a soap opera. And fan fiction comes close to equaling ketai novels in terms of fanatical devotion and sense of community.
What’s new about the cell phone novel is that people are starting to put content in their gadgets (even nonliterary people carry cell phones) . Here in the U.S., college age students are still not carrying around pocket or purse-sized gadgets (with iPhone being the important exception).
Cell phone novels are good first drafts and probably wouldn’t look interesting in print version. On the other hand, making a print version gives the writer the chance to produce a more polished edition later on for sale. So fans could download the free first draft or buy the later polished version–or both!
I wish the article had gone into more detail about what kinds of stories were making it in this genre: romance? humor? melodrama? suspense? How long exactly are individual chapters? The main thing the form has going for it is the do-it-yourself quality. When I was in school, literary types like myself dreamed of getting published. In other words: write, wait and be published. A decade or so later, people were dreaming of “making their own books.” My eight year old niece has already created two books on her own (one for class). For her, it’s write/publish simultaneously. That means a lot more crappier fiction, but also less time spent waiting.
Leave a Reply