Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
Oh, puleeeeeeeze. You can play with semantics to call a series of novels "chapters in a serial" if you like, but you know damn well that isn't the intended meaning of "serial" in literature in general and in this thread in particular. Stop beating that straw man.
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But the point I am making is that the history of literature is composed largely of serialized literature.
Dickens was able to make a living only because he wrote his stories as serials that were later collected into complete works...but people ate them up chapter by chapter, just as people have been enthralled for centuries by the 1001 Arabian Nights...the same as people gathered around their digital campfire every week for the past six years to follow the adventures of a group of castaways on a deserted island. The same as I followed the Great War on J. Michael Straczynski's epic Babylon 5 for five years. The same as kids have camped out at their newstand for 50 years to get the latest issue of Batman or Spider-Man (okay, 35-40 years for the Marvel set)...or the latest Harry Potter. Or the Spiderwyk Crhronicles...which are exceedlingly short books, I might add.
I'm not saying that YOU have to embrace serialized storytelling...but I'm really, really, really offended that some people are trying to deny ME my right to choose that work on Smashwords.
Now, this is Mark's company, he can do whatever he wants...but I think choosing to eliminate this type of storytelling is a serious disservice to his customers (and opens the door to someone else coming along to scoop up that market).
Smashwords has all along been established as an open community for authors where merit mattered most: Let the audience decide what is good, get out of the way in the relationship between author and readers, and have the best works rise to the top.
Except for you folks who want to write serialized novellas. Off the bus, all you lot.
It's really out of tune with the corporate spirit that Mark has done such an admirable job of fostering since he opened the company.
EVERY Smashwords book has a "wordcount" listing.
I can see an alternative to this: Break up works by wordcount in how they are categorized, for example.
But don't flat out ban them.
Needless to say, the debate is not over...or would that be a violation of the new TOS?