Anyone For Serials? by Debbie Bennett
Serialising appears to be all the rage at the moment. Popular in the 19th and early-mid 20th centuries, many of what we consider to be classics today were originally released in episodic format – you can read an interesting history with examples here . But the appeal of serials waned towards the end of last century, possibly due to it no longer being lucrative for the publishers. When you are relying only on physical books, there are unit print costs to think about, and publications with lower word counts do not cost significantly less to produce than their bigger counterparts – yet it’s difficult to charge the same price for less words. Fast-forward to the 21st century, the web and e-publishing, and everything changes. Now there is no print cost and design/editing can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be. Producing a novel as a single entity is going to cost broadly the same as producing it in ten episodes. So why are serials suddenly so popular again? I independently pu...