Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

By now, you must have read how Japanese consumers are reading more and more on their cellphones. Harlequin is the grey old lady of romance no more. Harlequin is teaming up with Softbank Creative to sell and distribute its romance manga via cellphone in Japan.

Beginning in April 2008 SoftBank will distribute digital versions of Harlequin K.K.’s successful comics on cell phones and Internet distribution sites. Over the next five years SoftBank will carry 1,000 Harlequin manga titles chosen from over 10,000 of the romance publisher’s novels.

I don’t know of another publisher that is pushing the international and digital boundaries like Harlequin. HarperCollins is a close second, but Harlequin, for all its faults, is thinking of the future.

Via news release.

I find this so interesting. Last year in Japan 5 of the top 10 selling books were “cell phone novels”. These novels are entirely written on cell phones using all of the abbreviations emoticons that I have so much trouble understanding.

These are very short novels but very successful.  In fact the number one best selling book last year was in fact a cell phone novel entitled “Love Sky” written by Mika.  The author explained her success due to difficulty most of her fans have in reading actual books and understanding their long difficult sentences.

That statement seems so hilarious, but I think these “books” are obviously interesting enough for the publishing houses in Japan since most of them are turning these cell phone novels into real books.

I wonder when this trend will hit our shore?

Via Collegian Online