Mobile phone novels are best sellers in Japan

In Japan last year, five the top-ten best-selling novels were originally cellphone novels that were composed on a mobile phone. One of the most popular authors of this new genre is a 21-year-old woman named Rin. She wrote the novel titled “If You” during her senior year in high school. For six months she tapped out passages on her mobile phone whenever she found a free moment, which was often during her commute to her part-time job. Each day she would upload her work to a popular Web site for would-be authors and readers could enjoy her latest work right after she wrote it. Her novel was voted No. 1 by mobile phone readers and was then turned into a 142-page hardcover book, which sold 400,000 copies and became the No. 5 best-selling novel of 2007 in Japan. Even with all this success, writers of the mobile phone novels would like their new written form to be recognized as a new genre.

Additional links about the mobile phone novel trend in Japan.
The Sydney Morning Herald
The New York Times