I wonder how serializing a novel would mesh with most author’s work flow. I guess most would want to write it first and release monthly an already finished product?
A lot of 19th century fiction was done this way. Authors (Dickens, etc.) tended to work from a loose outline and construct the details as they rolled along.
Peer at those books closely and you can see some odd detours that were shut down. Also some padding to get more segment-by-segment payments. But it's workable
Absolutely, but it was completely profitable for the author. Alexandre Dumas earned about 10,000 francs ($65,743 today) per installment when he was poached from The Presse by The Constitutionnel in 1845. And it's estimated he was making about that much per installment writing The Count of Monte Cristo. People followed it like it was Game of Thrones!
Serialization was quite common in science fiction pulp magazines also.
It's interesting to consider the meta-version of serialization..novel sets. Nothing new here, the Oz books being an obvious example, but it's funny how it plays into a human need to both read about familiar characters or places and to have physical sets of books that match.
The Martian was released one chapter at the time. Same with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. As for the last one, it's felt that it was written as it was going along, with certain changes the author normally would have gone back to fix. Like stuff ending up not mattering, or certain inconsistencies in the world building.
But even for larger book series this happens. Like Wheel of Time, one can in an earlier book read about Lan sitting and sharpening his sword. Some books later it's mentioned that his sword never loses its edge. So in later versions of the first book it has been changed to him sharpening his knife instead.
But my guess is those things would happen on a larger scale when not having the opportunity to go back and edit previous chapters.
The Martian is probably the best example of an author really embracing the 21st century. You give the text of the book away for free on a website and make money off the people who want the audiobook, the movie rights, the kindle, etc. In the 21st century, entertainment is free, attention is expensive, so you have to give away your free entertainment to get attention and then sell the entertainment in more rarified mediums like movies, audiobooks, even kindle, that require higher production costs than writing a blog.
I helped a writer friend move a writing workshop online last summer. This was one of the topics. The crowd seemed evenly split between:
- write it at once and release in chunks.
- release it as you write.
- And the most interesting (in my opinion), release it as you write and then if it’s popular, do a full round of edits based on crowd feedback and self publish the ‘definitive, crowd edited edition’.
There are quite a few writers who publish a chapter or two a week on Patreon.
It can produce some strange incentives: For one thing, they start getting reader feedback after every single chapter, if they want it. Some writers develop really fast-paced styles.
For another, they often start releasing chapters as they are written - meaning they can't have an editor who reads chapter 20 advise them to go fix an inconsistency back in chapter 4.
Also, some writers realise the moment they bring the story to a conclusion, they stop getting paid. That's OK for comedy/slice-of-life/X-of-the-week content - The Simpsons has no need for character growth or overarching plot lines - but works poorly for other genres: What good is a romance where the characters can never kiss, or an epic fantasy where the one ring can never be thrown into mount doom?
Of course, some of these incentives are hardly new: Other media have been subject to them for years.
Release it chapter by chapter and put it up on substack/patreon or just for free in blog-style format. That's what ithare.com and some other programming books did to build an audience before (self) publishing.
