The advent of ebooks and indie publishing has allowed the revival of a form with a storied history, but not many tales in the recent past:
the serial.
This may conjure visions of old-fashioned cliff-hangers and pulp novels... and you wouldn't be far wrong. But
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens was written as a serial, releasing two chapters a week for nine months! Dickens self-published the serial version of
Great Expectations in his own literary magazine,
All the Year Round, in an attempt to keep the publication afloat. Once it was complete, the works were republished in three volumes/novels. Dickens, being the accomplished writer he was, managed to create self-contained "novellas" (each about 6k words) that progressed like a novel, no small feat (he also outlined).
Today, there's
a myriad of serials being written and published, with indie authors experimenting like crazy with form, length, and time-between-publication. The stories are anywhere from 6k to 40k. Some are prewritten, some are written-as-you-go. Some are true novellas (individual stories), some are chapters from a serialized novel. The ease of indie publishing, plus the inexpensive distribution of ebooks, has allowed for all kinds of experimentation.
I'm experimenting with serialization myself, quite by accident. A story grabbed hold of me and demanded to be written, so I forced it to be a novella, because I didn't have time to write a novel. :) Turns out the story isn't letting go, but it's also the kind that lends itself to episodic storytelling, so I'm going to turn it into a series of novellas. Because I'm an indie author, and I can. :)
The real question is: do readers read these serialized stories? I think the answer is
Yes and
No. Just because you write a serial is no guarantee you will have readers, just as is true for any indie story. Plus you're hampered with the fact that most reviewers won't review short form works, and many promotion sites won't promote unless you meet a minimum workcount. But if you write something readers are clamoring to read? The answer is a resounding YES.
Examples: NYTimes Bestselling author Hugh Howey's meteoric career started with a 12k novella called
Wool. But an even more recent (and astoundingly successful) example is fellow Indelible RaShelle Workman's
Blood and Snow serial. Starting in June 2012, RaShelle has been pumping out her serial novellas every 2-4 weeks. She's currently up to volume 11, with all the individual novellas priced at 99cents and collections priced at $2.99. The novellas themselves are around 60 pages/12k.
But do they sell?
Oh yes.
RaShelle's sold over 130,000 copies of her 99cent novellas to date.
I don't expect that kind of success with my upcoming novella serial
The Debt Collector, partly because it's not in the wildly popular paranormal romance genre. But, then again, Hugh Howey wrote a post-apoc SF novella that took him to the stars, so one never knows what will resonate with the reading public.
But I love that indie publishing gives authors a chance to experiment and see what happens.
Have you written a serial or have any plans to?
~Susan Kaye Quinn
Susan Kaye Quinn is former rocket scientist and engineer, but now she writes novels because she loves writing even more than shiny tech gadgets. Susan is the author of the bestselling
Mindjack Series, which includes three novels, three novellas, and a trailer. She's currently writing a
steampunk fantasy romance, just for kicks. When that's out of her system, she has ambitious plans to embark on a series about the
Singularity (the time when computers become more intelligent than humans) that should appeal to fans of the Mindjack novels. Unless she gets sidetracked by this new future-noir novella or spends too much time on
Facebook. Could go either way.
