Love life: Mills & Boon makes romantic fiction digital

UK – Mills & Boon has created a fictional online hotel to serve as a backdrop for ‘an interactive storytelling experience’.

The Chatsfield, ‘London’s most stylish, spectacular – and scandalous – hotel’, is already the setting for eight of the romantic fiction publisher’s steamy novels. Now visitors can stroll virtually through The Chatsfield’s grand lobby and sample its signature cocktails, while encountering the storylines of its varied cast of inhabitants.

Mills & Boon has collated together more than 800 pieces of bite-sized digital content in a variety of media, in what the publisher claims is a world first. Guests can read the blog of Ally, a chambermaid with a secret, exchange emails with seedy bar manager Daniel Northman, and even follow characters live on Twitter and Facebook. Mills & Boon plans to develop the characters that attract the most interest.

Mills & Boon describes The Chatsfield as an experiment in ‘social storytelling’. For more on the ways in which brands are developing fictional worlds to tell compelling stories, read our Faction Marketing macrotrend.