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Serialized novels used to be common, though. Many of Dickens's novels were famously serialized weekly. Alexandre Dumas' famous novels The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers were also published as serials. There are plenty of other examples. More recently, apparently In Cold Blood and Bonfire Of The Vanities were both initially published as serials.

Even today, comic books are effectively serialized narrative stories that are pretty reliably published on schedule and have writers who have to keep up for months at a time.

> Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between.

Different writers have different approaches to work. Some writers work in highly productive sprints with long fallow periods, and you're right this model probably wouldn't work well for them. But some novelists do work steadily (Stephen King I believe still tries to write for a couple hours every single day and only takes relatively short breaks between novels), and the fact that this model used to work for a number of books that are now considered classics seems to indicate it can still work in at least some cases.

I'd actually be more worried about the consumer side - the death of magazines makes this model tougher. A given author can reliably produce a novel over the course of a year or two, perhaps, but probably not indefinitely (comic books solve this problem by having writing teams do arcs and then swap out the writer). Magazines used to bundle multiple authors, so subscribers weren't affected by the break period of a single author. In a world where people subscribe to individual authors on Substack and there's no bundling of many authors writing, yeah, it's a tougher sell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_(literature)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens

> His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5] Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.

Weekly instalments worked at that time and, while it would still work today to some degree, I see a lot of change in direction to binge-ing shows and books.

With that being said, in Japan web-novels are quite common among teenagers - which later on might get a publishing deal to get a print version. BUT, the authors are not professionals and write as a hobby, and making money with their stories happens when they get the print deal, and not publishing online.

It works in China, but there the authors get paid by word count. And yes, it does lead to exactly the types of problems you can imagine. But there are so many of these stories that some end up being very engaging.

Also, sites like Royalroad and Scribblehub have a fair few authors who make a significant amount of money through Patreon and the like.

> I don't think this'll work. Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between. The pressure of the next episode would lead to 'phoned in' chapters.

Not just from the author's side. From a reader's perspective this would also not work. I don't want to start reading a book a chapter at a time. I don't even like reading books that are part of an unfinished series.

For me, as someone who reads quite a lot of books, there is nothing more satisfying than finding a new series that you are interested in and discovering the entire series is already finished. You can then just binge through the whole thing.

The worst is when a series is 5-6 books in, you binge through them in a couple of days and when the next part is released you can't be bothered because you have forgotten what it was about.

I wish authors would take the Netflix approach and just finish the entire series before releasing it.

The effort of picking a story up again is a fair argument against. There are some genres (crime fiction) where I think that the anticipation of waiting for a chapter could genuinely add to the experience.

Yes exactly, I don't like this at all either.. I know I will get less absorbed in the story if I have to wait a month in between each chapter and in the end I'll just give up.

What if you start a story that already has 400 chapters out and you get a new chapter every week? Because that's the kind of numbers you can run into.

At that many chapters it's like you're reading multiple books.

There are enough books where the first few were good, but the final was terrible that I'm not sure I agree. I've learned to be happy with never having finished some series because they started great but by the middle weren't worth finding out how it finished.

> The worst is when a series is 5-6 books in, you binge through them in a couple of days and when the next part is released you can't be bothered because you have forgotten what it was about.

While I know that feeling somewhat…

> I wish authors would take the Netflix approach and just finish the entire series before releasing it.

… how would that work when series of books (at least the ones I'm familiar with) are often written and published over the course of several years, or perhaps in some cases even decades, i.e. much slower than your typical Netflix series?

At those timescales, that means authors would be getting neither feedback nor payments for a very long time, and it also increases the risk that in the end, the whole thing might not be published at all.

While unfinished series of books (or unfinished books themselves for that matter) can indeed be frustrating from a certain point of view, I still think the world is mostly a better place for them having already been published even in that unfinished state.

Maybe novels in a series need the literary equivalent of a recap, so one can remember who the characters were and what happened, instead of having to reread the whole series to understand the newest book in the series when it comes out.

This is almost exactly what a subgenre called LitRPG does. The authors usually run a Patreon where patrons can read chapters in advance. If you look at this [0], there are 4345 patrons and the lowest tier is $1.00, giving a lower bound of $52k per year. Although it's likely to be far more higher than that, if you look at the patron->dollars ratio here [1]. In general, the model seems to function very well in some specific scenarios.

[0] https://www.patreon.com/pirateaba

[1] https://www.patreon.com/Zogarth

Serialized fiction is basically how many many classics came to us. Today, lots of online fiction, like Andy Weir's The Martian or Scott Alexander's Unsong, starts out as serialized fiction that comes out in sections. The episodic model for books isn't novel.

Amazon is launching a new serialized book program called Vella.

It seems sort of overly complicated to me in that Amazon will sell "tokens" to readers in batches with discounts for volume. The tokens can then be spent on episodes on Vella at the rate of 1 token per 100 words in the episode.

Apparently this is a thing they're copying from elsewhere, and it's supposedly huge in China.

https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GR2L4AHPMQ44HNQ7

Martha Wells does this with her Murderbot Diaries books [1].

The series is fantastic and the latest book was great, but £8 for something that I finished in less than an hour felt a bit steep. Especially for an ebook with literally 0 marginal cost.

[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Martha-Wells/e/B000APZA1O?ref=sr_nt...

I'm sure it took me more than an hour to read that book, but I really enjoy that series so it was well worth the price to me. It's definitely a short book (novella?) but I get almost as much out of it as I do longer books.

And if the larger books are artificially padded, I actually enjoy them less.

I don't think it's completely impossible:

- I've paid $50 for an e-book with content that I thought was really valuable (and it was worth every penny).

- In the 2020s the book could be accompanied by supporting material (webcasts etc) which would increase the perceived value.

- Some people would be prepared to pay more for early access and to support an author they really like.

I think that part of it is a change in focus of the book's content: rather than being accessible to as wide a range of readers as possible make it really valuable to a subset.

Frankly too many (non fiction) books are essays spun out to book length. A series of chapters with more dense content would be, in my view, be much more valuable (counting the cost of my time).

And of course as others have noted that many great books have been published as serials (albeit in magazines and newspapers).

>Frankly too many (non fiction) books are essays spun out to book length.

I think by the time you took your scalpel to a typical business book, you might be left with 50-100 pages. The core idea is probably a magazine article but there are usually useful examples, context, etc.

The problem is that publishing industry economics demand something more like 250 to 300 pages (and truth be told a lot of readers would feel a bit ripped off if they paid a typical book price for a 75 page book).

I've been told that business books are 7 pages of content, and 242 pages of story so to get people to read the content pages.

Well, and to convince you that the content pages aren't some made up BS as supported by real customer experiences, academic research, etc. I could probably summarize a lot of business books (e.g. Crossing the Chasm) in a few pages with a couple drawings. But it would be missing a lot of nuance and, yes, would probably lack the story to make it stick.

There is actually an 18 page summary of Crossing the Chasm in my local Amazon store - it gets 2 star ratings.

I think that there are some potentially conflicting forces:

- a short exposition is probably better for the reader

- less than 200 pages is seen as poor value for money

- people generally expect to read from start to finish

For me I'd much prefer books which fail the read from start to finish test but have clearly signposted sections that I can choose to read and sample from.

Sherlock Holmes started with this model (being published in The Strand Magazine with other stories and articles) and it's still used for manga. It's a little bit different as they were not single-author, but I don't see why it couldn't work again.

> Authors tend to have phases of inspiration, and lulls in between.

Getting inspired is a part of a job. Here's an example:

"Someone once asked Mr. Faulkner if he wrote by inspiration or habit and he said he wrote by inspiration, but luckily inspiration arrived at 9 every morning."

I think most readers would scoff at those price points, especially when comparing to the plethora of content available from streaming services such as Netflix, which is at $8-9/month for individual use.

That being said, is there a model for a group of authors/publishers that is $8-9/month for a growing large selection novels (a la Netflix catalog)? If there is, it probably won't 'solve' any of the issues the article and others are bringing up here.

Some authors seem to chop up their novels into 3 or more novellas. Vandermeer's Southern Reach was all released around the same time and could have been one book from the outset. He would probably deny it, but w/e. Can't say I blame authors.

Word is that people on average don't read more or less than in the past. If that's true I wonder what's responsible for disparity. Are there more authors than before?

Yes, I think there's a strong possibility this might wind up being the case. My idea is only a working hypothesis as I try to figure out a model that will work for the fiction author and right now I'm banking on the idea that it USED to work (and that Substack CURRENTLY works). But I am definitely open to ideas if there is another one that might work better!

It was the dollar figures that didn't make sense to me. Sure, if you can sell your fiction book for $100 on an installment plan, that brings in a lot more money per fan than a $10 book sold in one shot does. But those two scenarios seem rather different not so much because one is episodic but because one is getting 10x the dollars for the same final product.

Web novels seem to do just fine releasing chapter by chapter in Korea and Japan.