Avenging Angel by A. F. E. Smith mobile book is available for purchase.
Description: “As a psychic detective with the Special Investigation Unit can you find the sinister chameleon and unravel the secrets of the Silver Lotus?”
Genre: Crime, Modern and Thriller.
The Oni Infection by Carlo-Jesse Miozzi mobile book available for purchase.
Description: “You are a future space samurai investigating a strange infection on a temple space station. Soon your comrades are gone, can you alone defeat the infection and save yourself?”
Genre: science fiction and space.
Dead Flowers by William Dunn mobile book is available for purchase.
Description: “You are implicated in a plot with vampires in London’s Victorian slums. Who and what is the mysterious girl and why are the police so interested in you?”
Genre: supernatural, historical and vampire.
The three tears by B Tate mobile book, free to read is a available.
Description: “All the ReLite scenarios are set in a universe where time travel is possible. In this universe two mighty empires, the Protectorate and the Governance, fight each other across time and space, attempting to disrupt the other’s history whilst protecting their own.”
The genre: science fiction, time travel and secret agent.
The new mifiction website was officially launched yesterday and PR campaign is underway. mifiction has 10 new mobile books – moooks in its system and more are being added weekly, across a wide range of genres for different audiences.
Most mobile devices, with Internet access, are supported including Smart Phones, BlackBerrys, iPhones etc. Moooks are available on PC’s and laptops including Mac’s. We will be providing a list of mobile devices available for the moooks as we test them.
OS Ticket implemented for customer support instead of using email contact. This is a perfect compliment to mifiction as we can keep track of customer enquiries and we also track any errors that occur on payment of the moooks. We aim to respond within 48 hours from our talented and experienced support team.
We’ve done a bit of research into how and when people use their phones and what those phones are really capable of. Apparently, the average amount of time someone spends using an application or playing a game is around 20 minutes per section. These 20 minutes are actually more usually spent back at home rather than waiting for a bus or otherwise on the move. Display wise, the amount of text that can comfortably be read and scrolled through in a single section on the average mobile phone screen is quite small at around 200 words. Phones are also interactive of course, more so than a printed page, allowing the use of hyperlinks selected by the reader to go off to different sections and take different branches through a story. What does this mean for fiction on phones? Well, we came up with a few ground rules for the mobile interactive stories we want to publish:
1) Mobile interactive fiction stories are made up of chapters, each chapter containing a number of sections that link together to form paths through the story.
2) Each section should be on average 150 words in length – and definitely no more than 300 words.
3) In a 20 minute phone session about 10 to 15 sections can be read – so that gives us the average chapter being 10 to 15 sections long.
4) About 10 chapters seems to be about the right length for a full interactive story.
Following these basic rules results in mobile interactive fiction stories that tend to be fast paced, easy to read and give the writer a great interactive experience. There’s more guidelines and advice on writing mobile interactive fiction.
Why have we come up with the idea of publishing fiction on mobile phones and making those stories interactive?
Well we were concerned from our own experiences of seeing in our own children how reading books seems to drop off quite a bit in the teenage years – and how technology on MMS, facebook messaging and texting really takes its place. We wondered what we might be
able to do to encourage teenagers to read – but without forcing them of course. It seemed reasonable to get stories onto the devices that they carry with them every day and use seemingly all the time – and with teenagers that’s the mobile phone. And once we were getting stories onto mobile phones it seemed reasonable again to make use of those phones extra facilities and make the stories interactive, using hypertext links between story sections
to allow the reader’s to make the choices as to where they go and what they do through the story.
And that’s how Mobile Interactive Fiction – mifiction – was born. With support from Cibas (Creative Industries Business Advice and Services) at Portsmouth we have taken the technology through to the stage where we are up and running and need content from exciting new writers to go forward. So visit www.mifiction.co.uk and enter the competition – it’s free to enter, you could win a prize and be offered a publishing opportunity so there’s
nothing to lose.
