2. WHAT IS A CELL PHONE
NOVEL?
keitai shosetsu
Written on handsets
Short chapters (100-200 words)
Diary like stories
Predominantly dialogue
Simple language
Textspeak/emoticons
Predictable plot
3. HISTORY
Japan
“Deep Love” by Yoshi in 2000
First mobile website
Publishing companies and agencies picked up on
the trend
Maho no i-rando (Magic Island)
4. AUTHORS AND READERS
First-time writers
Young female readers and writers
Teens and twenties
Use pennames
6. POPULARITY
Increases cell phone ownership/usage
Unlimited data plans
Publishing opportunities
Long commutes
Privacy
New era of expression
7. CRITICISM
Poor literature quality
Should be classified with comic books or popular music
The Web is more of a conversation. Books are more one-way
Writing can be brought online in a form that will invigorate
traditional authors, hobby writers, young authors, and even people
who have never really thought of writing anything more than a diary
blog.
8. The unseen or omitted becomes a vital part of the reading
experience, allowing deeper meanings and interpretations to unfold.
Weight of individual words
Power of cutting
Teenage fad
10. THE FUTURE?
New era of minimalism, art, and expression?
Could the education system use these concepts to encourage
interest in different forms of literature and a new way of expression?
11. WHAT IS A TWITTER
NOVEL?
Content that is published 140 characters at a time.
A writer can go from final draft to publication in seconds.
Twitter novels incorporate and exploit all the current features of
social media to develop followers.
The novels can make extensive use of links to photos, videos and
websites.
12. Tweets are archived off the Twitter platform, so that readers may access
the novel in full without having to scroll back through tweets to find the
beginning.
Twitter novels are normally abbreviated so that each post is as self-
contained and interesting as a complete scene or short poem.
Tweets are often scheduled to appear at regular intervals to best reach all
followers.
The novels make use of hashtags, such as #twitternovel to find common
readers.
13. WHY TWITTER NOVELS?
They are appealing because it can potentially reach and build a
large audience quickly. As with conventional novels, this audience
must be developed, and in some cases an author can find a large
audience quickly through word of mouth and viral sharing.
14. HOW TO START A TWITTER
NOVEL
Pick a topic/story line
Decide how you want to format it
Make sure you have a set plot
Make concise sentences that move the story forwards
• NO FILLERS
15. FORMATTING
Story in chunks - A single author builds the story post by
post. He or she may already have a manuscript, but it gets chunked
out a 140 or fewer characters at a time.
Single post, single story – The ultra compressed novel. An
example is novelsin3lines by Félix Fénéon.
16. Collaborative story seeds -A starting post, followed by a sequence
of Twitter posts contributed by followers.
Author Neil Gaiman kicked off the novel with the post: Sam was
brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush,
smiled & said, “We don’t love you anymore.”
Thousands of people have responded with the next possible
sentences.
17. TWITTER NOVEL TIPS
1. Throw Out The Manuscript
Twitter is instantaneous. Serializing a manuscript may be easy, but trying to
contract and make logical sense of it in 140 character bursts is not.
2. Have A Plan
Although there’s no need for a manuscript, you should know where the story is
going. The formatting for a scene provides more freedom to work within the spaces
you’ve created and allow the story to grow naturally.
18. 3. Manage The Clock
What’s great about a Twitter novel is that your content is no longer static.
Depending on how committed you are, you could have events happen in real time
using services like Tweetlater.
4. Not Just Story. Events
If a character is mugged at 6am, you could post a police announcement on the
Twitter novel looking for the perpetrator. What are the characters listening to on the
radio? Is someone calling them that’s important to the story? Use Twitpic to show
a photo of one of your friends or an actor to show the reader who is calling or
what the mugger looks like.
19. 5. Don’t Bury The Lead
More than five Twitter posts on any given day can be dangerous.
You’ll induce reader fatigue, and new readers will get lost quickly.
There’s an assumption that many of your Twitter followers will
enjoy your work while on the go, so their time to take in a novel may
be limited to short bursts.
6. Move It Forward
Simply put: Each tweet should move the story forward in some
way. If it doesn’t, cut it.
20. 7. Newbies And Greenhorns
Finally, you may have readers follow you after the novel has
started. Include link on your Twitter page of a home page.
Occasionally remind readers on days that you do not update that they
can catch up at this website.
21. The format is still new, but it won’t be long until we start to read about
successful Twitter novelists getting publishing deals. Why? A large following
equates to a large potential customer base. If you can show you have a
customer base, you are better positioned to land a book deal.
So far, publishers aren’t lining up to sign Twitter novelists. But as the
medium evolves, it could become a good place to try out story ideas and see
what can build a following. Japanese cell phone novelists have shown that
novels in short bites can be successful.
22. JAPANESE SUCCESS
Whatever their literary talents, cellphone novelists are racking up the kind of
sales that most more experienced, traditional novelists can only dream of.
One such star, a 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. It sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007.
23. “It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone
happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese
literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels.
“Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the
cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”
Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before,
and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to
publishers.
24. BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Onishi, Norimitsu. "Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular - New York Times."The
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