Rick Nelson

A novel cell-phone application
September 27, 2007

I once tried leaving my laptop at home while attending a tradeshow, hoping to rely on my smart phone to keep up with e-mail and to submit brief show updates. However, I found that even cranking out 200 words was exceedingly difficult, even with the addition of a nearly full-sized foldout QWERTY keyboard.

It turns out I’ve been a real miniature-keyboard wimp. As reported in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, 22-year-old Tokyo homemaker Satomi Nakamura used her cell phone to write a 200-page novel—a work called “"To Love You Again."

According to the WSJ, “In Japan, the cell phone is stirring the nation's staid fiction market. Young amateur writers in their teens and 20s who long ago mastered the art of zapping off e-mails and blogs on their cell phones, find it a convenient medium in which to loose their creative energies and get their stuff onto the Internet.” The most popular cell-phone-composed novels are converted to treeware, with one having sold 440,000 copies. As for literary value? Says the WSJ: “Most of these novels, with their simple language and skimpy scene-setting, are rather unpolished. They are almost always on familiar themes about love and friendship.” But for ones that make it into print, production values are high: “Publishers pay special attention to book design. ‘Clearness,’ a romantic tale of a female and male prostitute, has a transparent book jacket overlaid on the cover with the image of a bed sheet.”

Writing cell-phone novels is not without its occupational hazards. Ms. Nakamura, the WSJ says, got so carried away at one point that she broke a blood vessel in her right little finger.

Posted by Rick Nelson on September 27, 2007 | Comments (0)