At the recent Digital Innovators' Summit in Berlin, Cybermedia's Marco Koeder from Tokyo gave us the bird's eye view of mobile trends in Japan. Globally, there's no denying the uptick in smartphone (more than half the world's population owns a mobile phone, says Koeder) and tablet use.
Text me
According to Koeder, mobile devices are used by Japanese consumers to make payments, as identification and as platforms to write. I don't just mean to write a tweet, send an email or post to a blog—I mean, using mobile devices to write entire novels.
Text novels are "characterized by shorter sentences, the use of word contractions and symbols and moticons (such as those used in text messaging) and less detail (meaning that the reader must infer more or read between the lines more). Many of these works of fiction are actually written on cellphones as text messages that are sent to a website," according to Textnovel.com.
I had never heard of such a thing, but apparently it's huge in Japan, with text novels topping best sellers lists and Japanese publishers (a.k.a. platform owners) monetizing this user-generated content. It turns out that text novels also have a presence in the US and, coincidentally, I was asked to review a new book by award-winning text novelist Susan Wingate. (Ms. Wingate won a finalist award in the 2009 Textnovel Writing Contest.)
The book in question, Easy as Pie at Bobby's Diner (due out in May from Blue Star Books), was compared to Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe—a very funny book. (I'm a sucker for any story that combines the hero's journey archetype with razor-sharp, Designing Women-esque Southern belles.)
It's who you're with
While Easy as Pie is not a text novel, it shares the genre's unfortunate characterisics of using shorter sentences and providing less detail. Where Ms. Flagg's storytelling is buoyant with rich, charming personalities, Easy as Pie is listless, populated with wan, ghostlike impressions.
This is the second in Ms. Wingate's three-part Bobby's Diner series—perhaps readers are assumed to have acquainted themselves with diner owner Georgette Carlisle in the award-winning first book, Bobby's Diner, but that's a big assumption to make.
Fannie Flagg fans would expect Georgia-born Georgette Carlisle to be full of brass and sass: fearless, resourceful and charming. Ms. Wingate's Georgette, in contrast, seems a little too ordinary—a touch neurotic, conformist—the kind of woman ready to accept an evening of sophomoric innuendo as witty banter rather than change the subject. Her motivations remain unclear, her resolve questionable.
Overall, Ms. Wingate crafted a fairly solid mystery, with violent and wooden villains carrying the reader a few steps ahead of our protagonist throughout the story—a device perfected in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Ms. Wingate is clearly a storyteller and one with both a progressive strategy for navigating today's bleak publishing landscape and for adding depth to her somewhat tedious and faded heroine.
Digital chutzpah
In addition to writing novels via mobile text, Ms. Wingate has leveraged social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to try to bring Georgette Carlisle to life. An incentivized Bobby's Diner recipe contest on Facebook had yielded some reader engagement in the form of submissions, and readers are directed to social media profiles right in the story. (These profile links should also be embedded directly into online e-book versions.)
At the Summit, Hearst EVP and general manager John Loughlin compared digital media to the Wild West, a time when things were sloppy and people learned by trial-and-error. Bravo to Ms. Wingate in that respect, for being innovative and jumping into the literary future feet-first. Those who dream of being published should take a page from her book (pun intended) and consider writing a text novel.
