First question -
What is a serial web story?
Basically, it's when a writer publishes a fiction story onto the web.
I was reading over an article on the
NYTimes about a writer, Anna Todd, whose popular serial fiction, "After," has reached enough of a following to receive 10,000 comments per chapter within a day of it's posting.
Can you imagine? I'm lucky to get four comments in a single blog post, let alone expect 10,000 of them.
But then this made me wonder? I've obviously taken a stab at posting fiction to my blog and I guess I've taken this fiction to the wrong platform. Would I have more success on place like Wattpad, where Anna launched her serial story (read the latest chapter
here)?
The thing is she posts a chapter a day and I wonder - does she get feedback for her work before she publishes? Has her craft for telling this popular and growing story simply improved over time and she has no real need to pour over the words and edit like most of us do?
The reason I ask if you can envision success with web fiction is that it makes me wonder who the target audience is for these types of stories. With e-reading and various reading apps becoming a popular way to access the printed word, it may start to make more sense to have web fiction.
Like some of the self-published books I've seen, it isn't entirely without errors. I read over the book After 3 linked via NYTimes and I spotted a few items I may have suggested she fix.
But like a lot of self-published fiction, I also see a lot of work put into the story, including a well designed cover. So, it makes me wonder the benefit of doing this rather than simply releasing the book on Amazon or Smashwords, doing book tours via the Web, and going through the other types of procedures and marketing people go through when self-publishing.
I don't have much room to criticize the method, being an unpublished author myself, but I do wonder whether this will shift the self-publishing world a bit. Could you see yourself doing something like this?
Will this become the next 50 Shades of Grey?