Interest
Seikaisha Reveals "$1000 Novel" Project With Yuya Sato
posted on by Ko Ransom
The Japanese publisher Seikaisha (Star Seas Company) has announced that they will launch the "Yūya Satō x Seikasha's Gumroad 1000 Dollar Novel Journey" project, in which a new short story in Yūya Satō's Kagamike Saga is sold to only ten individuals who buy unique copies of the title for a thousand dollars each. The story will feature ten different endings, ensuring that each copy will be one-of-a-kind. Seikaisha has also made a pledge that they will not print the story commercially until July 2014 at the earliest.
Individuals interested in purchasing a copy of the story must follow a link from Sato's Twitter account that will be posted at 8 p.m. on June 14 in Japan to the Gumroad payment and content delivery service. There, the first ten interested parties will be able to purchase one of ten PDFs priced at a thousand dollars that contains instructions on how to claim their copy of the book. The hand-copied, stapled, and bound books will be personally delivered anywhere in Japan by Sato and his editor to each of the ten purchasers between July 4 and 8.
Yuya was born in 1980, received the Mephisto Award in 2001, and won the Yuikio Mishima Prize in 2007, making him the youngest to ever win the award. His Kagamike Saga spans a number of novels and short stories, and takes inspiration from J.D. Salinger's Glass family saga. Yuya was previously published in English when his "Gray-Colored Diet Coke" short story appeared in the second English volume of the Faust anthology. Katsushi Ota, the editor of Faust, is now Seikaisha's Vice President.
[Via Katsushi Ota]
