Starting over – Thoughts on Serials the Second Time Around

Less than 48 hours in to the start of my second official serial fiction, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on this experience.

The pause effect

In a best case scenario, when “Red Riding Hood”  completed in February, I would have taken a week or two off and launched immediately into a new book. This would have avoided the web audience attrition that happens during long breaks and also avoided a problem I anticipated would occur.  For two years, I had used analytics data to examine the habits of  my website readership. The majority of my readers had always been fairly quiet.  Less than 5% of them participated on the blog  in form of comments during a very good week and the majority did not use any method of social media (or RSS) to track for updates to the serial.  A good majority relied on direct surfing to the webpage.

Ending the last serial meant we were saying goodbye with only a vague idea that I would be back, lurking the web, at some point in 2013 (specified “summerish”).  School would be back in session, but no one had idea when (including myself.)

Weekly Round Up, Mother’s Day edition – Jukepop and Kickstarter Updates

Other Serial Sites?

This PR piece for one serials tries to make a case for book clubs reading serials. That’s not a bad idea at all, although it’s a bit of a gamble should said serial fail to continue or complete. The more interesting thing about this pR piece is that it mentions three places to find serials, only one of which I’ve seen before. None of the three have an emphasis on serials, so it’s a bit perplexing.

A leaner, meaner Kickstarter.

Having not funded the last version of the Kickstarter, Douglas Barre tries again with his online serial magazine minus the art with a shorter pledging period and lower funding goal. It also looks like another serial novel with its fairly modest goal of several hundred dollars will be in the clear with less than 14 hours to go.

Jukepop Serials listed in Duotrope

This should improve visibility to authors looking for quasi-paid work.  .

Speaking of Jukepop, I’ve been noting that their authors are increasingly active in the blogging sphere. For those of us not part of the Jukepop hierarchy, these blogs often are interesting insights into how it’s working and what the readership looks like thus far.  I don’t believe these stories represent the upper end of the traffic spectrum, but it’s noteable that some folks are seeing equivalent numbers (1000s) as independent sites.  Some interesting blogs of note:

• Interview with Nathaniel Tower, author of “Misty and Me” at http://seanmunger.com/2013/04/27/my-interview-with-serial-author-and-novelist-nathaniel-tower/ . He seems to be one of the “serialize live” crew, versus some of the other authors on JP.
• Beth Raymond writes about her experiences with “Secrets of the Conclave,” Part 1 and Part 2.  Her second post reminded me that I had a “process/finding time to write” post from a while ago.   As I’ve started working intently on the new volume of my own serial, I’ve been testing my old processes pretty hard.
• Angela Kulig indicates that her work was completed for a traditional market.
• Author Robbie MacNiven talks about “Werekind.”

On a random note, soft opening to serial begins today (actually midnight tonight). Keep track of the space at http://talesofthebigbadwolf.com/the-queen-of-swans/  over the next 24 hours!

Weekly News Roundup – ending 5/3/13: Wattpad, Wattpad, and your obligatory Atwood post

It might be coincidence that there’s a lot of Wattpad stuff to report this week, but I think there are a few reasons for this sudden attention.  I think everyone is still looking for the next big thing… there’s always a lot of bad news in the publishing world, and yet there are odd success stories like these.   Everyone wants the next Goodreads — an independent, accessible, and (yes) exploitable community of passionate readers.

Wattpad appears to have the unenviable position of boasting strong numbers and supporters.

Wattpad can keep growing as long as readers/writers get read and the community improves.  Their latest move to reorganize the interactive “club” structure seems to be an attempt to improve the social component of the site, particularly the quality of interaction.  They’ve reduced the number of groups and tried to promote association by “genre.” So far, so good.  I’m definitely in favor of this change at least so far. We’ll see if the changes (for the better) can be maintained.

Teen author Beth Reek’s online hit novel The Kissing Booth is released in paperback

Beth Reek is one of Wattpad’s home grown success stories.  She’s gotten quite a bit of press in her native UK for her accomplishment.   She represents a real Wattpad success story — where someone from the community ends up finding many reads and votes and then draws attention from the publishing world.  Glad that she’s able to parlay her digital success into print success.  Her family also just sounds fantastic.

However, I’m not all too sure that stories like this will continue to be made. Wattpad has aggressively begun pushing books from “the outside” that were previously published onto the community.  My feeling is that Wattpad and the traditional publishing world are going to be courting the readers at Wattpad on an increasing level, particularly since the acquisition of Goodreads by Amazon.

That said,  I’m not sure if Wattpad features actually result in sales for books (unless they’re part of a series), so it’ll be interesting for me to see if any authors report sales bumps after being promoted on Wattpad.

Wattpad has made some other interesting news as of late:

• Partnering with Amanda Hocking to host a book club designed around the Watersong series . I think this is the first new author to really try hard to work with the fans and I commend her efforts. I hope she’s able to establish a good precedent.
• Continuing to draw attention fromn venture capital circles, with headlines like “still not monetizing!”
• Posting impressive reader engagement statistics: People Spend Three Billion Minutes a Month on Wattpad, and Still It Refuses to Monetize  
• Getting shoutouts in relation to the James Patternson brouhaha on Digital Book World

Author, Margaret Atwood, continues to blaze trails

In this piece, Atwood hits on the truth (For her) about online publishing: I’m encouraged by all this online activity,” Atwood said, calling it an incubator in which writers and readers can find new paths to one another.

For me this is exactly the point of embracing the internet as a reading medium. It is a “something else” for those who write who want to be read or storytellers who want to be heard. What I respect is that Ms. Atwood’s purpose isn’t financial but artistic.

Followup: WordPress move

I wanted to just affirm that online-novel.com is going to stay at http://theonlinenovel.wordpress.com for the foreseeable future. So far wordpress.com has been kind in sending new followers every other day. Given that my objective is to grow awareness of the entire serial fiction/ webfiction/ online novel platform, it seems that so long as wordpress.com continues to funnel new viewers, there’s no reason to go back to blogspot.

Time running out for serial fiction Kickstarters + Random Margaret Atwood

Ah, sigh. The regular news stuff is slow this week. Count on Margaret Atwood to again serve as a missionary for serial fiction (see this Video interview at the LATimes whereby she discusses Positron for Byliner).  However, not much else to feature as news SO, I’ll bring to your attention several soon to end Kickstarters for serials.

1. The Chimerical Tales Kickstarter (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/321395714/chimerical-tales)  is coordinated by Douglass Barre, writer of the Image Comics series MYTHSTALKERS and DEFIANCE.  From his PR copy, he states he is aiming to launch an online weekly serial fiction magazine that would serve as “an anthology offering science fiction, fantasy and pulp adventure for the discerning cliffhanger enthusiast.”   It looks like he hopes to use his previous work  ”MYTHSTALKERS” as an anchor for this new publication.
2. The “Take the Summer” Serial Novel Kickstarter I discovered by searching KS for serial novel projects. The author has a very modest goal.  The concept of asking for patronage in advance is not new, but the author may be new to the serial fiction science, so I’ll be curious to see how this goes. (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/111529827/take-the-summer-serial-novel?ref=live)
3. Sharon Rose’s Kickstarter for “Descendants of Ancients” (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sharontherose/descendants-of-ancients-the-series) could use your help.  Sharon has been an active serializer for many years. (Her past work can be viewed at http://www.lilyfieldsfiction.com/.)

News: Chromatic Press – open submissions period commencing June 1

From an email sent today:

Of interest to all creative types, we’ve officially announced details on our next round of submissions this summer. Submissions will be completely open to the public, and we’ve put together a Submissions Guidelines document that includes every tiny detail; feel free to disseminate the document on blogs, forums, etc.

http://chromaticpress.com/magazine/ 

I recommend that one reads the PDF that’s linked in to the site carefully.  The target audience is female fandom friendly and the average serial length (overall) is pretty short — probably a little under typical novel submissions.

 

Deadline for Submissions spans June 1 – June 30. Good luck!

Semiweekly News Roundup, Ending 4/14/2013

From royalty to fugitive

In this showbiz article from Asia comes news of a live action adaptation of a successful online novel from China.  Again, no surprise here. As has been discussed on Pandamian and in other blogs, the serial prose/online novel format works quite well overseas.

Paywalls are Scary Growth Killers

In these two pieces, the authors reflect on paywalls. In general, there’s a great deal of uneasiness about paywalls and whether anyone truly is going to be able to monetize off a largely closed content system.

• One downside of paywalls: Where does your growth come from?
• Why Paywalls are Scary

More data and observations from Kindle Serials

In another interesting piece from PaidContent, author Laura Hazard Owen summarizes several pieces of information related to webcontent. Of note is her link to the WSJ which then links to another piece from April 11 on serial novels.  Catch this one before it goes behind the firewall. To summarize

* Their Kindle serial update frequency worked best for them on weekly basis
* Their best selling entry came in at 80,000 copies. Wow.

I think the comment on the bad reaction to the one story that sold episodes at 1.99 e ach was pretty insightful. I think the tolerance for the format largely is underwritten by the low price. The Kindle Serials model works more like a subscription and I think that while there may be room to experiment upwards with pricing… not by too much.  Serials are still very much a gamble for readers unless they know the author well and asking someone to invest beyond the common currency of the internet (which hovers around 0.99-2.99) is a lot to ask.

Waterstones founder to launch Spotify-like service for books in 2013

If you recall from a previous news post, Waterstones was experimenting with adding “in store/book only” copy to their in-store books.  This sounded like a measure to try to drive people back to their stores to buy books.  Now it appears they’re jumping into serials as well. 

All well and good, I wish them well. I’m fairly sure that Amazon’s success along with a lot of media profiling of serials end of 2012 and in early 2013 is going to mean more folks entering into the marketplace this year.   Hopefully this is good news for the rest of us independently serializers

Self Publishing Podcast talks Free Serials

Several of the podcast’s hosts are serializers on Kindle. They have done it both ways — releasing “episodes” of a season as different books as well as participating in the formal Kindle Serials program.  I mentioned their experiment in a previous post. In this podcast, they reflect on their free episodes experiment.

It sounds like the experiment has had some mixed results, including a disappointing lack of reviews.  This spurs a conversation about their readers and some pondering about what direction they should take for future episodes. I think this is a great podcast, but if you can’t spend the hour to listen or watch on Youtube, take a look at the show notes at the youtube channel.  Warning for moderate language :p.

I still wonder had this run as a donation model off their website if this might have resulted in folks simply providing money out of their good will as opposed to it becoming about reads for reviews or motivating other sales.

Admin notes / online-novel.com

So folks, the Blogger UI is kind of irritating me with its tendency to code clunky html.  So I will be experimenting with a WordPress version of this site.   I apologize for the confusion and encourage those of you using RSS feed trackers to use http://theonlinenovel.wordpress.com.

Two – as I said in the last post with Najela Cobb – if you are a serial writer with webfiction cred doing something new and are interested in being interviewed, please contact me with your name, URL (of your past or current work), and briefly describe what you think you have to share with other readers (current and future) of this blog.

Guest Discussion – Najela Cobb reflects on serializing prose vs. webcomics

Najela Cobb (Twitter, Facebook) and I started chatting via comments on an earlier post about webfiction/serial novels . In that conversation we started drawing comparisons between the two niches, particularly since webcomics are, to a degree, more successful than webfiction /serials in reaching an online audience.

This former prose serializer or “webfiction” writer recently ventured into a new story, but this time in the webcomics market. She just Kickstarted her webcomic, “Beyond Beauty” this past week.

This sounded like a good time to formalize our previous chat into a quasi-interview. Hopefully Najela’s responses offer some food for thought. And if you, also, are a serial writer with webfiction cred doing something new and are interested in being interviewed, please contact me with your name, URL (of your past or current work), and briefly describe what you think you have to share with other readers (current and future) of this blog.

And with that business stuff out of the way, off we go.

Please tell us about your former serial.

I worked on a serial called It’s All Relative (IAR).

Here’s a description: “The magical world of Atheria is unraveling at the seams as powerful hybrid creatures disrupt the essential balance. Amidst the chaos, a young revolutionary promises change and freedom at a cost. Three college students and their friends find themselves on different sides of a war where the line between good and evil is not so clearly defined.”

The story hasn’t really changed too much, but its execution has seen various incarnations. Its most recent form was posted at http://iarstory.blogspot.com. I believe it started in late 2007/early 2008 on freewebs and ended in 2009 on Blogspot. Extras, parodies, and collaborative stories are still available to read.

What sort of promotion (e.g., advertising, link exchanges, social media, mirror fiction directories or sites) did you do when you first started to put the story online?

I did promotion through Livejournal groups, Project Wonderful, Pages Unbound, Web Fiction Guide, and was active on forums. I also did review exchanges and collaborative fiction with other web fiction authors.

What successes did you think you accomplished in posting your serial?

My biggest success in posting IAR was watching the webfiction community take shape and grow over time. Posting online helped me develop a thick skin. I’ve learned to put some emotional distance between myself and my stories, which I think is a good skill for any writer to have.

What issues did you feel you could not overcome with the serial (e.g., lack of reader interaction)?