No surprise here: novelists find a new medium in Japan

When you practically depend on your mobile phone, it doesn’t surprises that you’ll actually start reading novels on it. That’s exactly what young Japanese people are doing nowadays…

Apparently amateur writers in the Land of the rising Sun have found a new convenient medium — the so called mobile novel — in which to loose their creative energies. Unlike with “standard, classic editions,” writers of mobile novels get instant feedback from their readers. That encourages them to keep going or even to (frequently) change stories to suit readers.

For instance, the 27-year-old women who writes under pseudonym “Chaco” wrote a sad love story called “What the Angel Gave Me”, which became so popular that she was getting 25,000 unique online visitors a day to her site. Naturally, she felt pressured to update her novel and respond to comments every day to keep readers happy…

The story goes on, and I’m sure Chaco is not the only one struggling to keep up with its readers’ demands. I just wonder will this remain the yet another Japan-only phenomenon, or we’ll see more people using their cellphones to type full-length books…

[Via: textually.org, image from teleread.org]