The Joy Of Serialization

I’ve finished the serial publication of my novel The Immortal Remains, and I’m not sure I’ll ever do that again.

It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with serial publication. In fact, I’m in the middle of serializing another novel, Pas De Deux, over on An Archive Of Our Own, because it’s a touch more NSFA (Not Safe For Amazon) and because it has a tenuous fannish connection.

But serializing is a surprising amount of work! Especially if you decide to do a long work on two and a half different platforms simultaneously.

Why Serial?

I thought serializing might get me more attention than just putting a random ebook up on Amazon and other platforms. I’m not a publicity-oriented guy. I’d rather write. My readership was very low, but greater than zero.

After looking at the various platforms, I decided to serialize on Medium, where I’ve had an account for several years, and Amazon Vella, since it was both an Amazon platform and might make some money.

Making A Serial

Some say you should write with serialization in mind, but it was too late for that. I wrote The Immortal Remains (TIR for short) between 2013 and 2019, then shopped it around to several uninterested agents. So my first job was to make a serial of it.

Fortunately, this proved to be fairly easy. Serial episodes should be 2,000 words or fewer (to better capture the growing population that reads on their phones), and I had written a lot of my chapters to that word count to make them palatable to an online crit group I belonged to.

It only took a week to break the story down into properly sized chunks, the vast majority of which ended on rising notes, if not outright cliffhangers. A few episodes went long, notably the final one, but I figured anyone who had read along for that long wouldn’t complain too much.

The Tedium Sets In

Once I’d divided everything up, the hardest part was uploading and scheduling the episodes. TIR is about 97,000 words long, and came out to 63 episodes.

Both Medium and Vella allow the writer to upload work and schedule releases in advance. This meant I needed to come up with an editorial calendar to keep myself on track. I decided to release two episodes a week, on Monday and Friday.

Though both platforms allow pre-loading and scheduling, the processes are quite different on both platforms. I started out uploading about ten episodes to each platform and scheduling their release dates. Most of my uploading sessions happened on Saturday nights while watching a movie with my wife, which made the chore bearable.

One thing that relieved the tedium a little was titling the episodes. TIR is very chronological; I never created chapter names. The divisions are all by week, day and (at the end) minute. I wanted a tiny teaser at the end of each episode to (I hoped) give the reader a little incentive to look forward to the next one.

Hunting for episode titles became a game. With some exceptions, I ended up using phrases from late in each episode, usually something that hinted at the emotional content of the episode’s climax. This title appears not only at the top of the episode, but at the end of the previous one.

All in all, this uploading/scheduling worked out pretty well. A few scheduling blunders found their way in, but I managed to put everything out in order.

The Rug Pull

A few weeks into serialization, Amazon announced the closure of Vella due to lack of reader engagement. They certainly weren’t reading TIR! But that left me with a single platform, and I wanted something outside of Medium, where the story was behind a paywall. Vella would have required payment as well after reading the first ten episodes, but we never got that far.

It never intended to make money from serializing TIR. After decades of writing for no compensation, I’ve accepted that I probably won’t make any money at it. That doesn’t mean I’ll refuse money; just that I won’t stop writing just because I’m not getting paid for it. That’s not an option for everyone, I know.

So I started over on Substack. It was the easy choice, simple to set up, free to start. I uploaded a bunch of episodes and scheduled them to publish daily until Substack and Medium were in sync.

Because it was there, I created a paid membership option, promising some “bonus material” for those who paid $50 a year. I was astonished when two readers actually signed up for the annual option; then I was dismayed to find that I would have to make some of my background notes and world-building materials presentable for the promised bonus product.

Now, of course, there’s an elephant in the room: Substack is a venture capital-owned platform with a known reputation for hosting far-right material. To me, that means it’s Nazi friendly and subject to making the platform worse for its writers and readers (Cory Doctorow calls this “enshittification”).

In the short term, though I’m philosophically opposed to the right-wing sympathies, I can live with my choice to use Substack. I know a lot of good people who use it for non-right wing activities. I’m not pulling TIL from the platform, but I won’t publish new material there. I’ve placed my personal blog on Ghost, a much friendlier platform.

The Other Serial

I mentioned at the start of this essay I have another serial novel, publishing on An Archive Of Our Own (AO3), the fan fiction behemoth. It’s also known for being open to publishing “original works,” stories that aren’t fan fiction, and for being a bit less fussy about some topics that would probably be banned on Amazon (thus my earlier acronym, NSFA, Not Safe For Amazon).

Pas De Deux is my second novel, a prequel to the first I wrote back in the early Oughts. At the time I wrote it, I was reading Terry Moore’s comic series Strangers In Paradise, which has a small fan following on AO3. PDD, as I call my story, is in no way a ripoff or retelling of Moore’s work, but I’d be lying to say that it’s not heavily influenced by it.

I’m posting chapters as they were originally written, once a week, and I’m currently at 8 of 21 chapters. I’ve got 62 hits (so someone has at it 62 times, though not necessarily read it) and a couple of kudos, which means someone liked it well enough to click an extra button to say they liked it. There’s no mechanism at all for making money on AO3, so readership is all I’m looking for.

In Conclusion

So, is there joy in serial publishing? Yes, but as with most of life, it comes at a cost, is fettered by toil and tedium, and its rewards are (at least in my case) both smaller and and larger than I anticipated. I am (self-)published! I have made less than $150! But people have read things I’ve written, and that makes me happy.