Serializing a Novel

One of the neatest things about the digital publication revolution is the wealth of new options that are available for writers. And sometimes the new ones are in fact old ones made new again by what the Internet makes possible.

Serialization dates at least to the Victorian Era (Gilded Age here in America), a time when mass literacy meant a strong increase in the demand for recreational reading, but most of these new readers in the working class couldn't afford to buy an entire novel in one purchase. However, they could afford to buy the inexpensive broadsheet newspapers that were coming out with greater frequency as the result of the development of steam-powered rotary presses and automated typesetting. As a result, their publishers didn't limit themselves to publishing self-contained short stories, but also printed novels chapter by chapter, one per issue. It was a sort of buying the novel on the installment plan.

By the middle of the twentieth century serialization had fallen into disfavor. Part of it was an economic shift that made books more affordable, and part of it was an association of the serial with gimmicky plots and cheap cliffhangers that often turned out to be stupid tricks played on the reader to create artificial suspense.

However, the serial is making a comeback in digital form. Several well-known authors have had reasonably good success posting chapters of their forthcoming novels on their blogs, often promising a copy of the corrected final version to everyone who subscribes with a financial contribution. But as the creators of JukePop Serials note in a recent blog entry on starting a web serial, it's not necessarily a good approach for a relative unknown. If you already have an established flow of traffic, you'll get readers -- but if your blog is on one of the back roads of the Internet, you're apt to be disappointed. You can self-promote, but you've got to be careful how you go about it, because just yelling louder and louder about your blog and your wonderful novel is apt to turn people away instead of getting them excited about it.

The alternative is serializing it through a serialization platform. Since this is the creators of JukePop promoting their own platform, they're quick to tout the advantages they offer over other serialization programs, including their program to get high-performing serials into libraries and to get writers connected with publishers for other types of contracts. However, they do also provide links to several other serialization platforms (a friend of mine is having some success serializing a novel with WattPad), acknowledging that other options do exist.

Some authors even go with multiple platforms. Generally you promise exclusivity for any given novel when you sign up with a given serialization platform (yes, some authors run the same novel on multiple platforms at the same time, but they're running a serious risk of getting caught out and banned for violation of the Terms of Service), so you'll be putting different novels on different platforms. If you want to take this route, you need to ask yourself whether you are prolific enough to keep up with a reasonable schedule of new chapters for all the different novels. Letting too much time go between installments can lead to loss of reader interest, which you may not be able to regain when you publish your next installment. If you've already written one or more novels and they've been languishing in a trunk somewhere, it may not be as much of a problem as if you're going to be writing chapters pretty much as they come out, but you really do need to think about how prolific you are. If you're going to be serializing multiple novels, each on a different platform, you also need to think about how well you handle juggling multiple storylines -- will you be able to keep them separate and clear in your mind, or will material from one novel bleed over into the others to the detriment of all of them?

One thing to remember, as with all self-publishing ventures, is to keep your expectations reasonable. Yes, some authors have readers come flooding in almost as soon as they start serializing, but most authors start slow and have to build their audience over weeks and months of careful self-promoting and networking. Sometimes it can be discouraging to go for weeks with only dribbles of interest.

On most of the established platforms, you will be competing against a lot of other authors for the traffic coming through the site. I've noticed over almost a year as a JukePop author that +vote distributions seem to follow a power law or Pareto Principle pattern. That is, about 20% of the serials published on JukePop get roughly 80% of the +votes, while the remaining 80% of serials have only a small number of +votes. If you sort by number of +votes and go to the very bottom, you'll see pages and pages of serials with only two or three votes,

If you can get about 20 +votes, you can rise above a substantial number of the novels being serialized -- which is where persistence really pays off. If you have only three or four chapters posted, each new reader you acquire will give you only three or four +votes when they first discover your serial. But as you get more and more chapters posted, each new reader you gain and keep reading through all your posted chapters gives you that much more of a boost in your +vote ranking -- a boost that's always heartening to see. However, to keep those readers going, and keep them telling their friends, you're going to need to keep posting chapters on a regular basis -- which means that you need to make a regular commitment to write and post, which can be difficult if you hit one of those periods when it seems like your readership dries up and you're just not getting new +votes when you put up new chapters.

Serialization may not be for everyone. Some authors may find the prospect of needing to write a chapter every week, or every other week, or every month, just too daunting. Others may find that regular commitment just what they need to get moving. If it's the right thing for you, by all means look into it.