That all said, I’m also a little perplexed at where the attraction of reading a serialized novel would be from a reader’s perspective. Who enjoys coming to the end of a really engaging chapter (perhaps with a cliffhanger ending) and thinks, “Thank God I can’t just keep going.” That might be enjoyable for some in the SM crowd, but I don’t see it being real popular in the “I want it now” world we live in.

The bottom line: to each his/her own, just don’t make me do something I don’t want to.

I know a lot of people could probably pull that off, but there have been too many times where something early on ends up creating a plot hole in the end and needs to be rewritten, or where I discover that there need to be scenes added. Characters that aren’t fully developed, plot points that need more explanation, etc.

That sort of thing can be easily edited once the entire book is finished, but that’s not possible if the first parts have already been released to readers. From a quality perspective, I think I’d rather wait until the entire book could be viewed as a whole and flaws corrected.

So here goes round #2.

Not just writers — but the market must be considered too.

Contemplate this: A friend of mine who owned an extremely profitable ‘pay-phone’ business went broke in the 1990s because of the rise of cell phones.

The foundation for cell phone communication now exists in Africa, South America, Asia, — world wide in other words.

If cell phones, can eReaders be far behind?

The market for humans telling each other stories began in the Ice Age and probably sooner, but we have some terrific Cave Art dating many thousands of years ago. What was that all about? Art for art’s sake? Hardly.

Those old guys were telling stories.

Stories will not fade from human domains — paper and print may fade — but stories will go on — and the digital market place is expanding geometrically.

I think we’ll get a lot more serials in future. I’m reading one now. It’s in ten parts, with a new part each month. It’s up to part eight, and I’m starting to wish that I’d waited until all the parts were available because I like to read the whole story in one go.

This writer, incidentally, wrote the whole thing before it was serialized.

However, I did pay $30 for the whole ten, which even at 200,000+ words (which I’m thinking it is), is a lot more than I’d pay for a book of the same.

Quite a few people are already experimenting with serial prose formats — largely on their own, since the big six in publishing are taking so damn long to get around to it. If publishers (and agents) want to be a part of the inevitable shift toward serialization, they need to get off their asses and do more than one or two “experimental” projects at a time, find more than one “experimental” author to support at a time. They need to have imprints dedicated entirely to serialization, fully staffed with both veteran editors and new talent that is willing to push experimentation to its edge. They also need to avoid the temptation to do everything “in-house” by hiring staff writers to handle the load or functioning in the way book packagers like Alloy do, owning the whole property, rather than having the author own it. Have a contract that benefits everyone, yes, but if publishers try to own everything writers create online, writers will quickly decide they don’t need publishers at all — whether or not that’s true.

I have always written stories of a serial nature, and I spent the early years of my life trying to force my natural tendencies into the “novel” box by writing stories that were x-words long, followed expected novel templates from opening to denoument, and could fit under convenient genre labels in stores. But now, I don’t see the point. If an idea works as a novel, then I will certainly write it as one, but if an idea is born to be on-going, with loads of chapter cliffhangers and built on an open-ended plot, why try to fit that star-shaped peg into a boring, round hole? These days, if my work is a serial, I plan it as a serial, and write it in an episodic format, even though I know there is nowhere to submit it yet, and no appealing way to monetize it.

There are plenty of writers like me who are looking for a publisher to work with on our projects. We are serious, career writers who prefer to work in a professional environment that will improve and polish our work. But where are the publishers publicly promoting aggressive, company-wide efforts to procure and distribute serials? Seriously, we can put “serial” e-books on Amazon this instant if we want, but we can’t submit serial proposals to the big six for serious consideration?

Tell your peers in publishing that many of us would rather not self-publish our serials (or, at least, not the ones that would benefit from being worked on by a professional team), but we WOULD like to make a living, and have careers, before we become old ladies, so if they would kindly get off their duffs and take action, we would love to bring our work to them and begin the serialization revolution on a massive scale.

And please tell them, if they don’t do it, one of these lovely indie/small publishers will do it, faster and better, and dominate the market before they ever have the chance to.

Of course you no doubt picked up the link from a secondary source, but the link itself takes a reader to the primary source — a WordPress blog titled “A New Kind of Book; Principles & Practices” by Peter Meyers.

His “About” page tells it all —

As for the expansion of what constitutes a book, I don’t think the current technology or presentation platform has even begun to touch the potential.

For me, a retired writer, with a tilt toward technology, I am creating a vBook — a little item that combines original material, video, audio, original art images, text and still photos. It’s my little experiment to discover if I can package a 20 page publication with a mini-DVD in a way that could be marketed on a book-store shelf as well as downloaded from online.

Of course, I am not the only one doing this. I’ve seen a similar concept posted on those sites where creative types seek funding for their project. I think what distinguishes my attempt from some of those, is my long career in non-fiction publishing and professional writing. Hopefully I will be able to manage my metaphors, and sentence structure in a unified manner and avoid some of the really, really, armature mistakes one sees online.

OK — this may be more than you wanted to know — but there it is. The world of books is enlarging as never before. There are no historic precedents for what we have before us now. Unfortunately, it will unfold in full after I’m gone and I do so want to see where it goes! I am haunted by a Kurt Vonnegut quote, “I ask myself about the present, how wide it is, how deep and how much of it is mine to keep.”

But yeah I agree the new tech will open up a whole new way of doing things….listened to a podcast when they were talking about interactive books with videos and commentary to explain things further if the reader wants to (although the concensus was it would only work for certain types of fiction). Interesting times.