Textnovel is a community of authors and readers using the Internet, cellphones, emails and text messaging to experience a new way to create, read and share fiction and other stories. Here are some unique things members can do on textnovel: * Create and add to your story on the website, by email or by text. Write your story from your cellphone! * Read the story on your cellphone! Get notifications as new chapters are added by your friends or favorite authors, either by email or text message or both. * Make your story private or public. Use a pen name or your own name. * Invite co-authors to contribute to and help you write your story. * Get noticed -- textnovel gives you the power to invite others from your address book to view and rate or review your story, moving you up in the rankings and increasing your chance of winning or getting published. * Create or read a story, novel or comic in serial form (add a chapter at a time). * Win big! Textnovel offers cash prizes to winners and publishing opportunities.

Cellphone novels are a big phenomenon in Japan and the phenomenon is spreading to other parts of the world. In 2007, 5 of the top 10 best sellers in Japan were cellphone novels. Basically this is a new fiction style that is characterized by shorter sentences, the use of word contractions and symbols and moticons (such as those used in text messaging) and less detail (meaning that the reader must infer more or read between the lines more). Many of these works of fiction are actually written on cellphones as text messages that are sent to a website, where interested readers can subscribe to be notified of new updates or download entire novels for a fee. Typically readers will read the novels on their cellphones or computers as well. The use of electronic tools to create and read the stories and get regular updates is part of what gives these novels their unique social characteristics and is giving rise to a rebirth in interest in literature, at least in this new form and in countries where this has become a big hit. Here are some interesting articles about cellphone novels or about reading novels on your cell phone:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html
http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2005/03/66950
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2007/01/72329
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120830725738118045.html

Textnovel subscribers can receive text messages or emails to notify them of updates to their favorite stories. You should be able to follow the link in the text message or email to read the story on your cellphone browser. Textnovel subscribers can also receive the entire text of new chapters in the body of an email, and as long as you can get email on your phone, this means you can read the chapter on your phone. You can choose to get the whole chapter by email in My Admin, by selecting "Receive Complete Text Udpdate" then save. Note that although textnovel stories can be easily read by most cellphone browsers, we are working on some updates that should make the stories compatible with all browsers.

No. We are hoping that we can help some of our members get published and that we can help some of them become famous and wealthy (and get some of the associated moola ourselves too!). In the future we may offer some electronic versions of popular cellphone novels so that readers can download them to their cellphones. We do offer some story and user profile enhancements (upgrading your story to Premium or your profile to Featured Author) in exchange for small donations, which we use to build and market the site.

A private story is a story you create that can only be viewed by you and by anyone you invite to view it. You might wish to do this if you are working on an early draft and need feedback from friends - you can always make the story public later. You might want to keep it private permanently. It's up to you. Just remember, only public stories are eligible for the textnovel contest.

A pen name is the same thing as a username. But it is the traditional term that authors use when creating a name for themselves that hides their true identity. On textnovel, it is the only name that shows up next to your story. Other members of the site can search for you only by your pen name (not by your real name). This means that if you want your friends to find your stories, you have to either send them an invitation or tell them the story name or your pen name so they can find it by using the site's search features.

Textnovel is hopeful that by the end of 2008 it can partner with one or more major publishers and run bigger and better fiction contests with more money offered.

Easy! Just become a member by registering, start a story and enter it in the Contest from the My Library page. You can enter one Basic Story and as many Premium Stories as you want. Make sure you meet the Contest Rules by the expiration date of the contest. Increase your chances of winning by inviting your friends to come and vote for your story or just read it.

That's a little tougher. Basically there are two key factors: the number of positive votes you get and the quality and appeal of your work, as determined by the textnovel editorial advisory board. The editorial advisory board makes the final decision but will give significant weight to the number of positive votes each story has received. That is why it is so important for you to invite as many of your friends and acquaintances as possible to your story so they can give it a positive vote.

The $1,000 prize is an incentive to authors to use textnovel as a tool for creating their story rather than simply submitting manuscripts to agents or publishers. The winner of the prize receives extra publicity, which should increase their chances of getting published.

We get this one a lot. We built the forum so that it automatically uses your pen name and your Textnovel password to log you in. If you are logged into Textnovel and click on the Forum link, it should automatically log you into the forum. If it doesn't, don't try to log into the forum yourself. Come back to Textnovel, log out, delete your cookies, login to Textnovel again, and try the Forum link again. If that doesn't work, you can try logging into the Forum but make sure to use your EXACT pen name and EXACT password from Textnovel.

If you win the prize, you will be asked to appoint Textnovel as literary agent to sell your novel. If Textnovel is able to sell it to a national publisher, you would then have to sign whatever contract the publisher requires, and Textnovel would receive standard agency commissions from any royalties you receive.

Hopefully! We have one that just started on January 1, 2010 and are talking to different publishers about sponsoring additional contests as well.

You can also post plays, screenplays, journals (fictional or biographical) and even anime, mange or illustrations if you want. However, in order to win a contest, your story must meet the criteria for that contest.

In the U.S., under the 1976 Copyright Act, a copyright is automatically created when the work is created. A work is "created" when it is fixed in a copy or recorded for the first time (e.g., the instant you lift pen from paper or your word processing software saves to disk). That may be the date you publish it on textnovel, if that is the date you create the story. However, publication is no longer the key to obtaining federal copyright. When a work is prepared over a period of time, the part of the work that is fixed on a particular date constitutes the created work as of that date. This means that if you create your story over time and add chapters as you go, each chapter may have a different copyright date. That doesn't really matter though; however you do it, you still own the copyright. Keep in mind, however, there may be some benefits to copyright registration. Visit the copyright section of www.uspto.gov for more info.

Send an email to: add@textnovel.com. The body of the email should contain the text that you want to add to the story. The subject of the email should have the following format: storycode:chapter number. So, for example, if the story code is 12 and the chapter number is 2, then the subject should be 12:2. If you want to add a new chapter, then make sure to use the next number in order (so if you already have 10 chapters, to add a new chapter you would use 11 as the chapter number). If you don't reference a chapter, the site will automatically add a new chapter.

From your cellphone, send an MMS text message or email to this email address: add@textnovel.com. The body of the text message or email should contain the text that you want to add to the story. The subject of the text message should be of the following format: storycode:chapter number. So, for example, if the story code is 12 and the chapter number is 2, then the subject should be 12:2. Notes: 1) The storycode can be found next to your story on you're My Stories page. 2) The chapter number can be found at the top of the first page of each chapter, and is the chapter number for the chapter you want to add to. Note: If there is already text in the chapter, sending new text to the chapter will add to the bottom of the existing text. 3) To send an MMS text message or email to add@textnovel.com from your cellphone, first add a new entry in your address book and then select the option that allows you to enter an email address in the entry (you might call this entry Textnovel). Save this entry into your address book. Now type the addition you want to make in your MMS text message or email (make sure you choose to send an MMS message not an SMS, because an SMS may not allow yo to use an email), choose this new entry as the recipient from your address book and make sure the subject line conforms to the requirements above.

To add an image to your story, select "Insert/Edit Image" in the fckeditor field, select "Browse Server," then select "Browse." Locate the image on your computer and then upload it to the Textnovel server. Then locate the image and insert it into your story. We are working on a more sophisticated image management and storage tool and hope to implement it soon. At this point you may be able to see images uploaded by other users on the Textnovel server for their stories -- don't use an image uploaded by another user unless you have permission from them.

The story score is the sum of votes plus subscribers -- but when someone unsubscribes later, the number of subscribers goes down but the vote doesn't go down. In other words, we let the story keep the original vote they got when that reader subscribed, even if that reader later decides to unsubscribe. But wait, its more complicated than that! Every time someone follows you, you should get one vote for every story you are writing (but only up to a maximum of five stories). However, the number of votes you get can vary from this -- if that person already subscribed to a story, then you don't get another new vote for the new "subscription" when they follow you. In short, the total voting score for an author or a story is the product of a number of variables. Just keep in mind that everyone is subject to the same variables.

We had a lot of members who created stories too late to participate in our last contest. They had spent a lot of time working on them and getting votes and subscribers. We felt badly about excluding them from the next contest but at the same time we didn't want to be unfair to new members who start the contest later. So we decided to try something new: letting the contestant's get to the top of the contest by most "views." All the view counters for contestant's stories are reset to zero as of January 1, 2010. Pre-existing stories get to keep all their votes and subscribers.

As many as you want. But only one Basic Story.

Great question! The answer is: what we are talking about is users who create software tools to increase their votes or views, or use other underhanded means to rise to the top. We don't want that. We do want you to invite your friends and family to read your story and vote for it!

Another great question. Of course you can create promotional items. Its your story! If you want to use the Textnovel logo or image, let us know and we'll send you an image file along with our License Terms (which basically say you can't use the image to bad-mouth us). As far as give-aways, we'll leave it up to you to decide. We aren't going to try to police that sort of thing.

We don't permit R rated material in any cover images or in the jacket copy or short descriptions of stories. So the only thing a young person might see on the home page is the name of the story and a description. Sort of the same way as if you were walking through a bookstore or library you might see book covers and titles of books that otherwise contained material that is inappropriate for a young person. Another example is if you were scrolling through cable channels, you might see the names of movies that are R rated. But we are actually more restrictive than a bookstore or library or cable TV, because with any of those, a young person can pick up the book and open it and read it, or turn to a TV channel and watch an R rated movie. But on our site, they can't read or visit the story unless they lie about their age or whether they have permission from their parents. At some point we may launch a children's version of the site and that would obviously not contain any R rated material.

Yes. You can upgrade your story to Premium and then export it into a pdf, doc, html, rtf or txt file. The export function allows you to include all story comments as well as all of your plot notes, character notes and miscellaneous notes.

The terms of conditions of the website say that you as the author represent to us that you have the right to make any posts (including book covers) and you will indemnify us if for some reason that isn't true. This means its your job to make sure you use an appropriate cover and that you have the right to do so. Examples of appropriate approaches are: you can use a photo or drawing you created, an image that is in the public domain (meaning the creator doesn't mind anyone using it for free and has explicitly placed it into the public domain) or you can get permission from the creator holds the copyright.