Thanks to Eugene Woodbury for the link to this long article. Having spent a fair amount of my working life traveling back and forth to Japan I find it especially fascinating. Eugene says: Great story. I think Cory Doctorow and Paulo Coelho would approve.
Following Starts, other publishers like Goma and Asuki Media Works moved in to cherry pick cell phone novel sites online and put out the next big hit. The number of cell phone novels in print began skyrocketing in 2006, when 22 books hit the shelves; the following year, there were 98. Even a no-name author with a cell phone novel publishing deal enjoyed a first run of between 50,000 and 100,000 copies.
The popularity of the genre is spreading beyond young girls. Ten of the bestselling printed novels in Japan in 2007 were based on cell phone novels, and each sold around 400,000 copies. Strikingly, the sales were strongest for costly hardcovers, which readers who had already experienced the work on their cell phone screens bought as memorials. Starts alone has released 40 titles that have sold 10 million copies.
Matsushima stresses that cell phone novels proved that there was a market for females between the ages of 10 and 20, a demographic thought to be apathetic toward reading. According to a recent Mainichi Shinbum newspaper survey, 86% of high school, 75% of middle school and 23% of grade school girls read cell phone novels.
