Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Interestingly, though, magazine or "serial" publication was also the norm for 19th century novels, and this was precisely the reason that many of them were so long: keeping them going was a money-spinner for both the author and the publisher. Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Thomas Hardy all published their novels first in magazines, while on the other side of the Atlantic, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry James did the same. One of the most extreme examples is "The Count of Monte Cristo", which Alexandre Dumas stretched out to 139 episodes!
One of the advantages of serial publication was that an author could change the direction the story was taking in response to public reaction as the serial was being published. Dickens did this a lot.
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Several of those magazines were weekly magazines. Dickens published a number of his novels in magazines where he was the editor. The magazines in the 1800's were very different than the magazines in the 1930's onward. Actually, there are a few authors publishing via Amazon/Kindle who seem to be adopting the weekly serial publishing mode.
I first got into SF&F towards the end of the magazine era. I originally read Zelazny's Hand of Oberon in serial form. I'm pretty sure that the magazines of that time wanted to limit a serialization to a smaller number of issues so they could carry more variety.