My serialized fiction experiment will launch tomorrow! First book price is $.99–all subsequent episodes will be automatically added to your kindle app with no further charge to you. Watch this page for the link!
Why serialized fiction? I’ve discovered that there are 2 kinds of readers: 1. Ones who LOVE big books (and cannot lie) and 2. Ones who like the instant gratification of short reads. The Secret Lives of Librarians was completed in May, just before I left for the Camino de Santiago Pilgrimage (which, btw, will be heavily featured in the next book in the series, Epitaph for the Forgotten. The problem? It’s HUGE. And as I publish each episode, I find that I can’t help but make some minor revisions/edits.
Of course, in discussing this “problem” with family and friends, they’ve told me they’d never read a big book because they don’t have time to read it all in one sitting or in one week or in one airplane trip.
And my other friends tell me they don’t like serials because they want to read it all at once. The same friends tune in week after week for True Blood, Newsroom, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and other serialized fiction on television. Hmmmm.
Me, I’m somewhere in between. I don’t have time for long books or TV mini-series and yet, get me hooked with a couple of episodes and there I am enjoying a Netflix marathon of the previous 5 seasons. So I decided to experiment with my new novel and make it serialized fiction.
Even with all the independent publishing going on, there are still gatekeepers as I found when I tried this experiment with various distributors including Smashwords, B&N, iBooks, etc. For now, Amazon allows me to publish serialized fiction, so for now that’s who’s distributing The Secret Lives of Librarians. Once the entire novel has been distributed as serialized fiction, the complete book will be available through all distribution channels.
Meanwhile, I’m experimenting with a new model for pricing and distribution. On a regular basis (probably weekly), I will upload a new episode to the existing book, meaning that it will automatically update after you’ve bought the book. The price will go up slightly with each additional episode until it reaches the “full price” of the completed novel. That means, buy early!
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