August 5, 2004
Selling SMS, CYOA Comics, and Happenin’ Hypertext
In various news… Via Joah, a Chinese author has sold an SMS novel for a pretty penny (especially when you consider how artificially depressed China’s currency is). Via Michelle, on a less-commercial note, the Long Island City-based Flux Factory is currently showing Cartünnel: a comix fluxture — a physical maze of intersecting paths, lined with comics, and created by a group of authors aiming for a “Choose Your Own Adventure” experience. Finally, don’t forget the ACM Hypertext conference next week in Santa Cruz. I’ll be presenting four times — and participants in the Blogging Tutorial will spend a full day hanging out with me and Matt Webb.
September 11th, 2004 at 9:08 pm
I originally posted this on the front page, but deleted it when Noah brought to my attention that we’d already noted it (whoops): Today’s New York Times has a story about Out of the Fortress, a novel written by Qian Fuzhang for distribution on mobile phones as 60 text messages sent twice a day over the course of a month. Each of the 60 chapters is 70 Chinese characters long. The novelist, well known for writing long print novels, was paid about $20,000 for the novel. Subscribers purchase the experience for slightly less than a print book would cost. Here’s another description of the work in case the Times link goes dead.