The Future Of Publishing.

[nigel p bird]

This article in the Guardian in the UK explores a new trend in China which is soon to be exported to the US:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/book...ure-publishing

It claims that 40% of internet visits are now to websites of self-published genre fiction.

It's well worth a look.

I wonder what you thoughts are and whether you think this is the next wave of publication method.

Thanks,

nigel

[mr ploppy]

I don't think it will really work for a western audience. TV and comics asside, we're not really used to serial fiction any more. When I first started serialising my short stories on a website I picked up about 40 visitors each Friday (new episode day), but they were only staying for about a minute. At a guess they were just copying it into a word processor, they wouldn't have had time to read it online. It was only when I put final chapter for an episode that people spent any amount of time on the website, and when I started collecting finished stories into ebooks and putting them on Feedbooks nobody bothered with the website much after that, they just waited for the new finished one on Feedbooks.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

I don't think it's so far-fetched. It reminds me exactly of reading comics, horoscopes or sports stats in the paper every morning, or listening to a morning radio show. I can easily imagine regular readers of periodical content... we've had that in the U.S. for years. It just has to be properly packaged, and find a following, to work.

Cost would also be a factor: How much would you charge for how much content? Do you use a pay-as-you-go micropayment system, a subscription model, or something else? Does it start free and charge after the story is 50% done, or after a critical mass of downloaders has been reached? Some interesting models could come out of that.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

I don't think it's so far-fetched. . . . It just has to be properly packaged, and find a following, to work.

I think there is a small portion of readers whose reading attention spans are limited for whom serialization will work. For the majority of readers, I doubt it will work in the U.S. Americans tend to require instant and complete satisfaction, which a serial publication doesn't supply. I do not think the analogy to comics is fitting; you are comparing a minimal effort reading experience to something that requires interest and retention. If a comic reader stops reading for a few months and then picks up the comic again but at its current place, there is no sense of mystery or loss as regards the storyline. Not so with quality fiction that is serialized.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by rhadin

If a comic reader stops reading for a few months and then picks up the comic again but at its current place, there is no sense of mystery or loss as regards the storyline. Not so with quality fiction that is serialized.

That would depend on the comic. They're not all about people in their underwear hitting each other every month.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by rhadin

Americans tend to require instant and complete satisfaction, which a serial publication doesn't supply.

Yet, Americans are also busy people who like to fill small bits of their day with entertainment, and don't always have time to sit down and read for hours. Serialized content would work with commuters, people on lunch or breaks, people waiting for others, etc.

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

That would depend on the comic. They're not all about people in their underwear hitting each other every month.

This. Serialized content can be of any subject or quality, humorous or serious, etc. The Japanese material the article alludes to are essentially multiple kinds of graphic and non-graphic fiction, from deep SF concepts to soaps to light adventure. All of those are genres that are popular in the U.S. and could lend themselves to serialized content.

We're talking about content that is doled out in shorter spans of time... not months, but weeks or even days. That is comparable to episodic TV, in which people manage to follow even intricate storylines with a week's break between episodes.

[Lazybones]

Before I started self-publishing novels, I wrote serialized genre fiction on a Web site for role-playing games. I posted several million words across a number of stories over a course of about seven years; by the time I stopped I had a few hundred regular readers. Most of those readers were just the sort that Steven described, folks who dropped by the read my posts before they started work or on their lunch breaks. The positive support I got from them is what convinced me I could take a shot at writing novels.

A lot of my earlier sales and reviews came from those readers, who followed me over to Smashwords. I also found that writing serials improved my writing considerably; basically every installment had to be like a self-contained story of its own, so I learned a lot about pacing, plot, and writing action-packed scenes.

[dworth]

Serialised fiction was quite common in the West until relatively recently. Charles Dickens and other nineteenth century authors as well as lots of 'golden age' sci-fi, for example, were initially published this way.

[nigel p bird]

My feeling is that is will work, certainly to the point of making it financially viable.

I guess that means there's an opportunity out there which has yet to be fully explored and might be 'the next big thing'. It's not going to be me, but I'd think this will fit in snuggly with e-books and their evolution and, let's face it, how much of the TV world works along that model.

Thanks,

nigel

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

From a production standpoint, it's certainly viable. The creator develops a story broken up into daily-digestible chunks. They have the choice of writing the story on the fly and releasing it as they go, or writing it in total and releasing the daily portions afterward. If the story is done and being released daily, they can be working on the next project. Get a dedicated audience going, and you can have a steady income coming in.

The biggest catch is getting them hooked, then getting them to agree to a daily payment, or what amounts to a subscription, to follow the story. If it's a daily payment system, it better be robust, in order to handle a large number of micropayments potentially in concentrated periods (morning rush, lunchtime, evening rush).

And would you charge for all of it, or offer some part of it free to entice readers? How much would you offer? If your future stories involve the same characters, do you need to offer free material for each story, or just the first one?

Lots of interesting questions.

[BillSmithBooks]

I agree with you, Steve: I think there's lot of potential to hook readers on daily serials -- it has worked for comics, soap operas, many TV series, serials in movies in the 1930s-50s...and in print, serialization was a major method of publication until about 50 years ago.

And I agree that the challenge is convincing the customer to ante-up regularly.

I was thinking of publishing my ebooks in shorter (15,000 word segments), serialized, much like a comic book...a new issue every few weeks as it were.

I also wonder if authors might want to band together to jointly publish works, much like the manga "phone books" in Japan. The phone books combine many, many serials (sometimes 20-30 or more) into mammoth print editions (black and white newsprint) with a relatively cheap cover cost of $10 or so...the idea is that while you won't enjoy all of the stories, you will most likely follow at least 5-6 and pick up each new weekly edition. The publishers are always ending one story and starting all new serials every issue to hook and keep readers. Sales stay high, buoyed by popular anchor titles (manga equivalent of Batman or X-Men) but new titles are always added to see if they can generate another hit...readers figure they'll really enjoy *something* so they are more likely to pick up these "grab bag" volumes.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

So... who's got an idea for a serial-ready plot?

(And if anyone says "sparkly vampires"...)

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

So... who's got an idea for a serial-ready plot?

(And if anyone says "sparkly vampires"...)

1) Murder on campus: investigators must interview a number of students & teachers and visit a number of locations; this breaks up easily into short sections.

2) Bomb threat downtown: A terrorist calls in a threat to the local news; getting information to police & politicians and investigating the reality of the threat and tracking down the caller work nicely as a serial. Each chapter can end with either a small victory. ("We cleared the library without scaring the visitors! Yay!") or a cliffhanger ("what do you mean third graders are visiting city hall today? No!")

3) First Contact: We land on a planet with aliens & need to convince them (1) we are not food (2) we don't think they're food (3) we need an alliance to help avoid/defeat the local variant of Predators/Alien Queens/nanobot invadors. Chapters can alternate between politics/negotiations and alien culture/physiology.

4) Psychic thriller: a scientist discovers "dreamwalking;" chapters focus on different groups' use & misuse of this new technology while a serial killer is apparently using it to commit murder through nightmares.

5) Romantic comedy: One's a department store clerk; the new beloved (of whatever gender author cares to write) is a parking attendant; their days are plagued with rude and clueless customers with variants of anecdotes snagged from NotAlwaysRight.com. They swap stories in the breakroom and fall in love with each other.

6) Life swap: A pair of adult identical twins complain to each other at a family holiday that they each have the most miserable life. They make a wager & decide to swap for a year, each pretending to be the other to see whose life is *really* worse.

[teh603]

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

So... who's got an idea for a serial-ready plot?

(And if anyone says "sparkly vampires"...)

I've actually done serialization, but abandoned the project a mite too early since I didn't understand the model for ebooks at the time. Understanding what I do now, I would've kept going and seen the plot all the way thru. I wrote something like nine or ten chapters and uploaded six or seven.

No sparkly vampires, although there was a perverted dragon who couldn't keep her hands off the boys.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by teh603

No sparkly vampires, although there was a perverted dragon who couldn't keep her hands off the boys.

O-kayyy...