Serial Fiction's Next Installment
Is serial fiction finally having its moment, or is it just another wave of articles asking if serial fiction is finally having its moment?
There is this recent idea, on the literary Internet, spreading fast, that serialized fiction is about to come back in a big way after vanishing a century ago. Thanks to the Internet, shrinking attention spans, new reading habits among young digital natives, expanding interest in iterative fictional “universes” (think Marvel movies) with no proper end or beginning, and new online platforms for paying independent artists, the reasoning goes, there is an untapped market for publishing on the installment plan, chapter by chapter. Readers will flock to their favorite authors, paying them a subscription rate or a small fee per chapter and watch over the weeks, months, and years as a novel slowly fills their inbox. Those who want to wait to read the whole book at once can buy the final version after its initial run is finished. Authors will distribute their novels as they wish, cobbling together their own collection and distribution with a Patreon account and mailing list, or through glossy apps like Amazon’s new Kindle Vella, which will operate as a kind of marketplace for serial stories, charging customers by the word.
In this brave new world of publishing, authors will be able to connect directly with their fans, earn more money for their work by cultivating relationships and soliciting feedback from their most loyal readers, bypass the naysaying, penny-pinching publishers, and make literature that finally matches the reading habits and preferences of the common reader in the Year of Our Lord 2021. Salman Rushdie is on board.
Of course, we’ve been here before. As everybody knows and every article on the new serialization repeats, serial publishing harks back to Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, and the glory days of the 19th century novel—those “loose, baggy monsters,” as Henry James once called them, with their meandering storylines, scads of side-characters, digressions, flashbacks, and other forms of plot padding. Although serial publishing predates the 1800s, it was the runaway success of Dickens’s Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club in 1836 that usually gets credited with kicking off the trend in Western literature.
Dickens, of course, was a master storyteller with the deepest bench of iconic characters this side of Shakespeare. He would have been successful, one hopes, in any time or place where books are printed and sold. But he also had good timing: thanks to industrialization, urbanization, and rising literacy, Britain had the world’s first real mass culture, with a voracious appetite for content. Back then, books were just about the only content around, but there was a mismatch between medium and market: for the average working-class Londoner, a hardcover book was an expensive affair and free public libraries were still a few decades away. What readers could afford, though, were magazines, newspapers, and journals. Authors moved their stories to where the market was, and so the serial novel was born. The format dominated the fiction market for decades, only slowing down around the 1900s and dying out entirely by World War II.
But when I say that we’ve been here before with the rise of serial fiction, I’m not talking about Charles Dickens. The rise of the online serial novel has been prophesied since the beginning of the World Wide Web. In addition to such luminaries of the serial as Dickens and George Eliot, Salman Rushdie will have for company Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Jeff VanDerMeer, and Lena Dunham. Each has tried their hand at online serialization in the last two decades. The publishing industry, so far as I know, did not tremble and quake, nor did a revolution in literary fiction happen. In fact, King’s The Plant fizzled out in 2000 after only six entries, leading to a truly unprecedented phenomenon: Stephen King gave up on a bad idea. 1
Among established authors with roots in regular novel publishing, there are only a few who seem to be truly successful, as Lincoln Michel has pointed out. N.K. Jemisin and Seanan McGuire have both managed to get thousands of readers to pony up $5 for monthly short stories through Patreon—that’s $60 a year for twelve short stories, which is three or four times as much as those same stories would cost packaged as a regular book. That’s a nice deal, if you can get it. Then again, Jemisin and McGuire are hugely popular sci-fi & fantasy writers who could live perfectly well off their regular book sales if they wanted, as with all the other authors listed above.
For the new serial publishing to really take off, it should work for newer, less established authors. Serialization has to prove that it can work for anybody who knows how to write a good story and attract a fanbase. Has it? The record here is mixed.
There are, of course, popular novelists who got their start in Internet writing communities (especially for fan fiction) and made the jump to mainstream publication, like Jemisin or E.L. James (author of Fifty Shades of Gray). As is often the case, their works in progress were published in forums and online platforms piece by piece. They weren’t sold serially, though. Nobody was paying for the original online run of Fifty Shades on a chapter-by-chapter basis. More importantly, the dynamics of fan fiction are very different from more traditional publishing and readership, with built-in audiences and outreach. It’s not at all clear if those authors would have found the same success publishing serially with their own, completely original characters and settings. At least not if they were also charging money for it.
Even Andy Weir, probably the most successful writer to get his start publishing an original story as an online serial with The Martian, wasn’t charging money for it: he did it to solicit expert feedback from scientists and engineers on his story’s sci-fi bonafides. The blogged book was popular enough to secure a traditional publishing deal and a movie adaptation, and now Weir is doing pretty well for himself, but he hasn’t gone back to blog publishing since. As far as conventional literary writing goes, though—and plenty of critics and book reviewers aren’t falling over themselves to call Andy Weir’s books literary fiction—that’s pretty much it for Internet serial publishing successes in the literary mainstream after thirty years.
Then again, there are thousands of writers who have done exceptionally well for themselves in the online economy. You just have to be looking for something weird. Elle Griffin, herself one of the biggest voices in the current serial fiction conversation, has been running a fascinating series of interviews this summer with writers who really are earning six-figure salaries writing serial fiction on the Internet: Zogarth makes $20,000 a month writing fantasy novels that read like computer role-playing games; Emilia Rose brings in a six-figure annual salary for her tales of werewolf erotica; D.C. Kalbach earns the same for his romance novels; Wildbow earns $7,600 a month for his urban fantasy novels. Clearly it’s possible to make a good living publishing serially.
The through-line, for each of these authors, is two-fold.
First, they just write a lot. Kalbach publishes something like one romance novel every single month. Rose has multiple ongoing serials, each of them updated with new chapters every week. It’s not unusual, in these talks, for writers to mention uploading a new chapter of one or two thousand words every weekday. They write to a strict schedule and don’t seem to do a whole lot of editing or revision.
Second, they all occupy extremely niche areas of genre fiction: not just romance but werewolf erotica; not epic fantasy, but video game-themed litRPG. These writers all belong to tiny, enthusiastic communities of readers with highly specific tastes. The more particular the fans’ preferences, the more exuberant the response and the more open their wallets. After all, these aren’t tastes that conventional publishing and the public library system can accommodate. This puts these authors in an advantageous position economically: if you want werewolf erotica—and some people really, truly, desperately want werewolf erotica—you’ve got to pay for it.
You can probably see how these secrets of the ultra-successful serial writers aren’t useful for most mainstream authors. Unless you’re Anthony Trollope, composing a full chapter every weekday without any revision or editing just isn’t feasible for any writer working to the traditional standards of prose craft. Even prolific authors, like Stephen King, go through multiple drafts of a work and submit to the long, careful process of editing and revision. There also just aren’t that many microgenres with sustainable communities for every author to cater towards, nor are great authors all that interested in writing for those highly particular tastes. Sometimes a great writer just wants to write about a woman going shopping and hosting a party, or a man eating a biscuit and thinking about stuff. Sometimes writers are writing for communities that don’t exist yet, or inventing them as they write.
I’m not trying to be a snob here. The world is a better, saner place for having successful, hardworking litRPG authors who care about their fans. But their model of serial publishing success isn’t sustainable for most writers, or especially interesting to the vast majority of paying readers.
More importantly, even among hardworking, extremely-online, niche-adapted writers of serial fiction, there are far more losers than winners. As Griffin herself points out, Wattpad’s two-year experiment in monetizing the most popular serial fiction published on its platform ended with its top 550 authors earning, collectively, about two million dollars: less than $2,000 per writer over two years, on average. Even that number doesn’t tell the whole story: because of how the payouts scale with popularity, the distribution is probably more top-heavy, with a handful of top earners raking in most of that money and leaving crumbs for the rest.
Nobody wanted to pay for the Internet’s third best author of werewolf erotica. And if the highly specific, passionate world of fanfiction can’t accommodate more than a few writers doing the same thing, what hope is there for the rest?
Silicon Valley & our tech overlords, the usual source for disruption, also haven’t had much luck with monetizing the serial format. There’s Amazon, of course, but whether or not the new Vella program makes any money is almost besides the point: Amazon loses money on everything except for its online marketplace and cloud data centers that subsidize the rest. If Vella is successful, it won’t be on the strength of its authors or fanbase, but on the millions of sales that happened on Amazon as you read this essay.2
As for the rest of the Big Five, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have been retreating from the book business practically since they entered it years ago; and Facebook, to state the obvious, has a vested financial incentive in making sure nobody ever reads any books again.
Among startups, too, the prospects aren’t bright. The biggest is probably Serial Box, which brought the TV-production method to novels: a writer’s room trading ideas and switching off on individual chapters, breaking multi-book series into “seasons,” and living off a mixture of sales, subscriptions, and advertising revenue. Within a couple of years, though, they rebranded themselves as Realm, and pivoted hard from mostly text to audio-only and an ad-based revenue model. I don’t know a lot about experimental publishing, but I do know that when an ad-supported tech startup changes its name and pivots away from text and towards an audio format that’s easier to quantify and advertise through, it’s probably not earning back its venture capital infusions. Realm, then, looks less like the bold future of books and more like the last ten years of tech startups.
The prospect of a serial publishing revolution, looks about the same now as it has for decades. Twenty-five years of experiments by Silicon Valley, social media, and Stephen King have failed to out-earn and outlast plain old book publishing. I’m not saying a shift is impossible here, but if those three forces can’t turn a profit and reshape the culture, I’m not sure what will.
Or maybe we’re just looking in the wrong place. After all, whatever the fortunes of serial publishing, serial fiction actually is in the middle of a golden age: ten years into the great streaming content disruption, there have never been more people watching more TV shows and heaping more critical acclaim on them. I’d wager a far greater proportion of citizens today are hooked on episodic fictions than in Dickens’s day, and the stigma towards caring so deeply about the unreal problems of imaginary people has never been lower. (The educated upper classes didn’t look kindly on Dickens or novel-reading in general.) What happened to serial fiction is ultimately what happened to the rest of our literature, politics, art, religion, philosophy, and reality: it migrated to the screen. Mohsin Hamid is probably right, then, to insist that trying to write the kind of sprawling, Dickensian melodramas that would work best as serial novels is to wind up playing TV’s game and, inevitably, losing horribly.
Somebody, then, should probably warn Salman Rushdie as he pivots to serialization. He should know a thing or two about what goes wrong when you translate a book to the screen.
King also published The Green Mile serially in 1996, releasing the book in six installments of about a hundred pages each. But these were paperback books--a throwback to the old days, not a forward-looking Internet experiment like The Plant.
Well, that, and Jeff Bezos’s overriding, Citizen Kane-like drive to possess all the things of the world that he covets even if it turns them to ashes in his trembling hands, the bitterness of loss and rejection tempered by the savage joy of knowing that if he can’t have it, at least nobody else can, either, of knowing that the book business will be undercut into oblivion but that at least he himself, Jeff Bezos, will have the honor of selling the final book--a dog-eared third printing of Atomic Habits-- to the final customer, who will come on his knees, prostrating himself before the throne in the sweltering, sticky, tropical heat of the Amazon Spheres, the supplicant’s $3.89 crumpled in his trembling hands as he raises the offering towards the Prime One, he who has sundered once and for all the haughty worker’s guilds and their ancient superstitions about bathroom breaks, he who has used the clouds themselves to store all the wisdom of the world, he who can extend his power anywhere in the world within two sunsets, he who has touched the very face of God deep in the howling void of space, he--and nobody else!--will close the book trade’s loop once and for all, so that his enemies may not use its profits against him, as a farmer must cull the weakest calf to save it from the wolves, as a general must burn the fields of his people to save their fruits from the invaders, as a melancholy god must drown the world to preserve the souls of the righteous few from the sins of the masses. Amazon’s business model is weird.