Web fiction
Cell phone novel
A literary work originally written on a cellular phone via text messaging: Japan's keitai shousetsu tradition, begun in 2003, and its global spread.
A cell phone novel is "a literary work originally written on a cellular phone via text messaging." In Japanese the form is called keitai shōsetsu, and the first appeared in Japan in 2003: Deep Love, by a Tokyo writer using the pen name Yoshi. Its authors were mostly young women writing romance, often university students, publishing under pen names; chapters ran roughly 70 to 100 words to fit phone screens, delivered by email, SMS and subscription sites. The print pipeline was real: in 2007, 98 cell phone novels were published as books, and five of Japan's ten bestselling novels that year began on phones. Koizora reached about 12 million online views on its way to print and film, and the movement spread to China, South Korea, Europe and North America.
For web-fiction writers the tradition is the oldest proof of the format's core claims: chapters written for a small screen can carry a full story into a commercial pipeline, the route today's light novels follow, and it is a distant ancestor of the serial culture around Shōsetsuka ni Narō.