Digital Storytelling: The Evolution of Publishing Fiction on a Mobile Device

Today’s mobile devices are insanely powerful, offering a fully programmable interface for ebook publishing over and above just presenting pages on a screen. Given all this power and flexibility, what kind of story can you tell? How can you immerse your readers? What can a truly digital story look like when the publishing medium has full-time internet access, the reader’s location, and can be programmed page by page? What if a story is treated as software in addition to fiction?

This talk will examine a novel publishing experiment – a full graphic novel published exclusively on an iPhone that uses email, SMS, geolocation, and more to pull each reader into their own version of the story over the course of 10 days. More than a glossy look at a work of fiction, we will discuss concepts within the story and publication platform that immerse readers and which can be applied to other digital stories. We will also examine concrete statistics such as user retention and usage patterns, and whether the combination of statistics and real user feedback judges the project a publishing success.