A fun way to gain new readers or a huge piracy risk?
I’ve been feeling the urge for a while now to serialise my work-in-progress. I’m not sure which one. Perhaps Black Hare Valley Book 1 – testing the waters before it’s eventual release. Or perhaps a book I’ve not written yet – in other words, I’ll write a chapter each week and share it’s progress as it happens.
I’m not sure where this urge came from other than the fact I’ve seen other authors doing this and thought it looked fun. It could potentially be a cool way to gain interest and new readers. It could bring me some useful feedback too. It would be a nice incentive to write. And, I’ve sort of done it before.
If you’ve followed my blog from it’s very early days you’ll remember me sharing The Boy With The Thorn In Its Side chapter by chapter, way, way before it was published. This blog was the first part of my author platform to exist and sharing my work back then was scary but exciting! Nothing bad came of doing that either. In fact, I got regular supportive comments and those early readers gave me the confidence to keep going. I also wrote The Tree Of Rebels straight onto Wattpad, sharing a chapter a week until it was written. The final book I released was a more polished version.
These days though, I worry more about the risks of posting a future book like this. I recently found out that one of my books has been illegally pirated onto the LibGen site. This is the site Meta has been scraping books without the author’s permission, and without any payment to the author, to use the data to train its AI models. There is a court battle on the horizon that will affect us all.
My books being pirated and illegally downloaded is horrible enough, but the thought of a book not yet published being stolen in this way worries me more. I guess it didn’t worry me so much back in the day because I was just starting out. I wasn’t even sure I would ever publish anything at that point.
But now… I’d feel sick if I shared a work-in-progress only to have it stolen by someone else.
I guess I’m writing this to ask if anyone has any advice? I’d like to know if readers would be interested in this sort of thing. Would you like to receive a chapter a week as a book is being written? Would you prefer something like that to be free? Or do you think it’s something I should only offer to paid subscribers? Does anyone know how best I could protect the work against theft?
And finally, if I did do it, what would you be more interested in? Black Hare Valley which is written but not ready for release…. Or something brand new, something I write on the go, just for you?
Let me know!
The Glorious Outsiders 
I would say, go for it!
I’ve written four serials for Medium and I’m looking at another one to start soon.
As a pantser, I love writing the episodic reveal of a story. People seem to enjoy reading them too, which is a bonus. It’s a great exercise, keeping writing to provide a buffer of three or four weeks ahead of publication and just letting the ideas flow.
My series are written in a different format to my novels. I’ve cut out a lot of the world building and backstory. Instead, I concentrate on action and try to provide a cliff-hanger ending to each chapter.
Once the serial has finished, you have the bones of a novel. I’ve expanded two of my serials into published novels and I’m working on a third. All you need to do is add the filling, the bits that you didn’t need in the short format.
As regards piracy, what you’re serialising is just one version of the story. The final novel, after you’ve added all the bits and pieces, will be something completely different.
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Thanks so much, Richard, that’s a great reply and really helpful. I think someone stealing the idea/concept is what worries me the most. And I can’t quite decide whether to serialise something that is already written but not ready for release (it might be useful to publish it one ‘episode’ at a time to gauge how well written it is in terms of structure, flow and cliffhangers etc! OR do I write a brand new book using this format? I have one book in mind. It’s planned to some degree, characters are all in place and I’ve written the first few chapters in rough… Or do I do both?? Hmm
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Stealing an idea/ concept is nothing to worry about. While ideas cannot be copyrighted, so they are free to take, two writers cannot write them the same way. The final result depends on each writer, and nobody can write YOUR story, just a somehow similar one. And while similar stories exist plenty in the world, people like one or another, depending on how they resonate with the writer and the writing style.
Look only how many retellings of Cinderella are in the world, and from Cinder to Pretty Woman, they are totally different (and enjoyed widely, even if they are retellings).
About serialising your work, it would be interesting. I read serialised fiction on blogs and on Wattpad (and fanfiction on its special site). I liked it and I encouraged the writers (or I said openly what I did not like).
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Thanks so much Marina! I really appreciate the reply on this. I think I am going to do it! I just need to decide which WIP (one that’s on the go, or one planned but not written, so I would actually write it a chapter a week and post?) and what platform to do it on. I think I would maybe do Substack and here…
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