Experience selling single stories or chapters at a time instead of whole books?

[James]

Lately, I've been hearing of a book sales model in which people buy single chapters of books at a time or single short stories from collections rather than the whole book at once.

Does anyone in any genre have any experience with these models where customers pay for each chapter or each short story individually? What are your thoughts about it, compared to publishing and selling whole books at a time?

[Anna]

I suppose it worked well in Dickens' time when workers would buy the latest instalment on their way home and read it by candlelight. The cost of one of his long and interesting stories would become affordable.

I know that it does happen now because I have seen it on GR. Perhaps it was in the Navigating Indieworld group. You could look around there and see what they had to say. I know quite a few people tried it out but I am not sure of the outcome.

[Philip]

Anna Faversham wrote: "I suppose it worked well in Dickens' time when workers would buy the latest instalment on their way home and read it by candlelight. The cost of one of his long and interesting stories would become..."

If you look at the books that appear as a series many of these have fewer words than a normal book i.e. the method is in use as small books rather than chapters

[Sheila]

Some authors either give or sell chapters of books on their websites. Here's an article about it. https://justpublishingadvice.com/what...
You might contact authors who do it for more info.

[Melanie♥]

From a reader's point of view, I can tell you that almost all of my GR friends disliked it intensely. It was a big topic of conversation a few years back in several of my groups. Many boycotted the "buy by the chapter" method of selling.

[Angel]

As far as I know I think Radish.com still does that where you can serialize your works uploading chapter by chapter but the consumer must purchase each chapter to be allowed to read it after it is uploaded. It's more for mobile phone readers.

[Joseph]

I published an anthology of previously published work, then broke the separate stories out into smaller ebooks and sold them separately with pointers back to the anthology.
My next step was to query magazines with the same short stories as reprints.
Every time one of my stories appears online or in print, my anthology numbers climb.
So far, so good.