Reviving the Serial Novel
May 19th, 2003
Last week I ruminated publicly (which is basically what one does in a weblog, duh) about writing fiction in public, as opposed to just ruminatin’ .
The idea’s been knocking around in my head ever since. Tonight I got around to doing a Google search for “blog novel serial.” Lo and behold, there’s a growing number of serialized novels presented via blogs. Just a few:
I haven’t done more than peruse the table of contents of these, so I can’t attest to the quality of these attempts. But it has my gears turning — weblogs seem like an excellent medium for the serialization of a novel.
Hey, it worked for Dickens. :-)
To clarify: Agent to the Stars isn’t actually a novel I serialized; I just put the whole thing up. However, I did serialize another novel on my Web site last year — Old Man’s War — and the results of that were pretty nice: I sold the book to Tor, which will be publishing it in hardback in 2004.
For people who have a tendency to write draft after draft but never actually send anything to a publisher, serialization is a remarkable experience. Those daily deadlines really change the way you think.
And building a fan base, however small, was stunning. Sure, I hoped to attract readers but it wasn’t until those first emails started to arrive that I realized I could get to know the fans personally, read and sometimes use their plot ideas, and even find them proofing my work for me.
Weblog serialization has a lot going for it.
Hugh
American Invisible
Serial novel by blog?
I started thinking about the possibility of writing a serial novel by weblog. (I’ve also thought about writing a community novel by Wiki, but that’s a whole other can of worms.) It seems to me that it might be a…