why so serial?
Matthew asks in response to my post about writing 10,000 words in a single day:
“You ever thought about writing serially? Like releasing a few chapters of something a week and making it like 99 cents? 10k is absolutely insane. I’m not sure I know another author who makes 10k words in a week.”
Good question! Actually, I have tried something like that, and I concluded that it doesn’t work at all well.
I released THE THIRD SOUL as a serial, and I wrote THE BONE QUEST series of FROSTBORN short stories structured as a serial, and based on the reaction to them I’ve come to the conclusion that a large majority of readers simply do not like serials and prefer novels. Both THE THIRD SOUL and THE BONE QUEST get a lot of complaints because of their length.
So, I’ve concluded that the majority of readers prefer novels to short stories, novellas, and serials. (I like short stories, but I kind of suspect they might be an artifact of the old days when people did a lot of reading in magazines and there were only so many pages available.)
I think the only way a serial would work is if you wrote the entire thing in advance and made sure each, say, 10k words were ready to go every Friday, like a webcomic artist who prepares three or four weeks’ worth of comics in advance before launching his website.
Of course, if you did that much work, you could just release it as a novel to fewer complaints about length.
I’m launching three new novel series this year – SEVENFOLD SWORD, GHOST NIGHT, and a science fiction series, and I haven’t decided if I’m going to have short stories accompanying them. If I do, I think I’ll group the stories in their own series like THE BONE QUEST, but have each one be completely stand alone.
-JM
