5 of the top 10 books in Japan were written on and for mobile phones. That’s pretty crazy… and an interesting market to say the least.

What’s more, a Japanese book editor speculates that allowing readers of the books to send in suggestions, critiques, and comment hugely spurs the paper bound sales of the book (which are near the record sales of the mobile book).

One of the amazing things about creating a community that allows people to feel like they are a part of what’s being created is they will support, buy, and spread the word about your product.

[I wrote this post once but Clipmarks decided it hated me for offering the idea of a story across Twitter and decided to erase everything I wrote. Beautiful. I'll just circumvent them and write it on my own platform. Jerks.]

clipped from www.readwriteweb.com Amazingly, though many of these novels are released in serialized form for free via a mobile web site called “Maho no i-rando” (Magic Island), which provides tools for people to write their own mobile phone novels, Japanese youths are still buying them in record numbers when they’re published in traditional paper bound form. The reason, speculates one editor at Goma Books, which publishes a number of keitai shousetsu, is that many readers send suggestions and critiques to authors by email while the story is unfolding and end up feeling as if they had a hand in helping craft the novel. For readers, purchasing a hard copy provides a physical keepsake of the work they were so emotionally invested in.

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