Nina Lassam on the Transmedia Novel Experience and the Mobile Market | Digital Book World

By Nina Lassam, Marketing Evangelist, Wattpad  | @nlassam

Interactive eReading apps are some of the most popular apps in the mobile marketplace. Many of the most successful ones ­invite readers to experience a portion of enhanced content on their mobile devices with an additional element of gamification or imagery that builds on what is found in the paper book. As fiction continue to move onto screens, their possibilities expand beyond the source text to create a new market for publishers and entertainment producers.

At Wattpad, we recently launched a new transmedia eReading project with beActive Entertainment that invites readers to become gamers, creators and observers in a 360-degree story experience hosted on an eReading environment. In other words, rather than interactive elements that enhance the original narrative, the story itself is designed to be told across multiple interconnected formats.

Readers will find the YA novel Aisling’s Diary on the same screen as the story’s webseries adaptation. Each chapter of the novel and corresponding video will be syndicated weekly, similar to how a traditional cable television program would be aired. As viewer behavior shifts to incorporate social media and additional formats, the audience for transmedia projects continues to expand. Our goal with this project is to incorporate popular story sharing formats (text, film and social media) onto one platform.