The 2013 Winner of the Royal Palm Literary Award* for best cell phone novel is...

The story is one of a teenaged prostitute in Tokyo. It's called Deep Love and it sold 2.6 million copies in Japan. It spun off into a television series, a comic book series, and a movie. Its original marketing was entirely word-of-mouth.

And it was written for cell phones.

When we talk about digital publishing in the States, we talk about Kindles and eReaders and special applications for iPhones. In Japan, they talk about keitai shousetsu--cell phone novels--a twenty-first century equivalent of the old serials we and our parents used to watch at the movie theater.

The cell phone novel is published in small sections that you can read on your phone any time you have a few seconds. In Japan in 2007, half of the top-ten selling novels started as cell phone novels. Random House is taking notice. It recently bought a stake in Vocel, a company in San Diego that helps providers enrich their cell phone content.

In the United States, the website textnovel.com allows you to sign up to receive feeds of novels. The quality is uneven, but you might find a new way to get your work out where people will read it. Ask the guy named Yoshi, whose novel sold 2.6 million copies.

*The Royal Palm Literary Award Competition doesn't currently have a category for cell phone novels, but it does have 23 categories for published and unpublished work. The awards are presented during the Florida Writers Conference in October. For more information, see the RPLA website.