Serial-ly?

AN: Please forgive me the horrible horrible pun of a title. I wrote this at 5 a.m. with no sleep. I’ve been reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 and it’s just a touch addictive; also I’m a bit of an insomniac and I apparently think I’m just HILARIOUS at 5 a.m. Also if you laughed at the title and got where I was going feel free to disregard this message.

I’m leaning more and more towards making this work a serial (even though I actually have a good chunk more written than one might expect when starting such an undertaking) but I still have a few questions I need answered before I decide on anything. I’ve Googled a few articles on the process for Kindle Serials and in some it sounds like you’re provided an editor by Amazon, and in others it sounds as though the authors already had an Amazon editor. Maybe it’s based on my own experience with editors but finding ones who can go through 10-15k words on a weekly basis and have a few back and forths to make sure that it’s perfect who isn’t through Amazon sounds a little nerve wracking for everyone involved.

Not to mention the fact that the idea of people being able to comment on particular characters and scenes (and that apparently the author should be influenced by that, or at least the authors who have written thus far seem to allow themselves to be) is a little odd to me. The whole thing is not entirely unlike writing fanfiction in that you post in chapters (if you’re smart on a weekly basis), it’s (hopefully) edited, though most times not, and because it’s a live story people can comment in real time. Where some authors might like the idea of a novel being a bit less of a one man show, I’m not sure how I feel about the idea of readers getting a say in how the story ultimately turns out. Not that anyone can require you to make changes based on what readers say, but that isn’t how writing works. If it was, I suspect Harry Potter (among others) would have turned out quite differently, a lot less characters would have died, and in the long run it wouldn’t be the story we know and love (and secretly cry ourselves to sleep over). People will always have an opinion on one character or another who should die or should have lived, but if authors start making changes to their entire storyline based on something a reader thinks should be in there rather than what the story calls for…. I think there’s a problem there. Sure the reader might want to know more backstory about a given character that isn’t mentioned much, but I think it becomes a slippery slope. Suddenly you’re trying to please everyone and you end up pleasing no one. But hey maybe I’m overreacting. Maybe reader driven literature in which readers tell the authors where the story should go and what it should be, is the way of the future.

I’m curious to know your opinions on all of this, and if you’ve worked with Kindle Serials or know more about it, what you think of it and the idea.