Cell Phones Killed the Novel Writing Star
Video killed the radio star and now it looks like cell phone novels are poised to take on novelists.
From the New York Times’ web site comes a story about how novels written on a cell phone are making their mark in Japan.
From the report:
One such star, a 21-year-old 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 last year. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007, according to a closely watched list by Tohan, a major book distributor.
I suppose there are two ways to look at this. On the one hand you’ll have those people who lament the death of ‘art’ in our culture and that this kind of material has no place in the literary world.
On the other hand you’ll have those who like the idea of the free market deciding what’s going to be popular as opposed to a committee at a publishing house.
Like it or not, however, the times, they be a changin’.
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Saturday, January 26th, 2008 at 8:34 pm under
