ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how digital novels reaffirmed and provides models for the commercialization of fan-produced culture worldwide. It provides a different reading than the plethora of journalistic reports and academic theses that question the literariness of the narrative forms or view them as fascinating but short-lived popular culture. Magic Island and similar websites offer a model of “joint creation” that extends the historical practice of reader comments in Japanese periodicals, such as response columns in 1920s girls’ fiction and manner magazines and 1970s girl’s comic’s magazines. Magic Island advises that authors write their novels on cellphones so that they can see how they will be read. The most popular cellphone novels cast underdog teenaged characters in the “pure love” stories that were emerging as a distinct genre marketed to women and men. Cellphone novels discuss issues rarely covered in pure love stories, such as domestic abuse, prostitution, rape, drug addiction, and suicide.
