Tag Archives: serialization

Serials in the 21st Century

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Keep Your Eye on AmandaThe first serial I wrote was Keep Your Eye on Amanda. Chapter 1 appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph on October 3, 1996. Readers loved it. Authors found new readers. (I recall riding a NY subway, watching an old man read a chapter of The Secret School in the NY Post.) Other newspapers joined in. Readers clamored for it. Teachers used it in classes, grandparents shared it with distant grandchildren. 

Though I remained the nominal head of the company, Linda Wright took it over, transforming it into a unique publishing venture. The name Breakfast Serials was introduced. Other authors joined in. Katherine Paterson. Linda Sue Park. Joseph Bruchac, among others. Illustrators Brian Floca, Emily Arnold McCully, Timothy Bush. 

Under Ms. Wright, the growth of Breakfast Serials was extraordinary, eventually reaching a circulation figure of thirty-three million! It probably became—in terms of readers—the biggest publisher in the world. All, as it were, beneath the radar. But just as Breakfast Serials expanded around the world, the US press—under the internet onslaught—virtually tanked. What to do?

Instant Serials

Ms. Wright regrouped and has now invented a way to make serialization available online, as Instant Serials. Here, terrific stories and great art are available in serialized form, along with a means of chatting (online, with no smack talk) about the stories. The reader (parent, grandparent, and teacher) sets the release dates of successive chapters. Which means readers will still have to laugh, cry, and wait … a little. Quite amazing.

“Make them cry, make them laugh, make `em wait.”

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St. NicholasOnce Dickens made serialization popular, and profitable, it became a 19th Century publishing norm. There was the work of Dickens of course, but think of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, War and Peace, Sherlock Holmes, and many, many more. They were issued in serialized form. Recall that most important 19th (and 20th) century magazine for young people, St. Nicholas, which ran serialized novels. Growing up, I read the serialized novels of Thornton W. Burgess in the daily pages of the New York Herald Tribune. All followed the credo of Wilkie Collins, who, when speaking of the methodology of serialization, said, “Make them cry, make them laugh, make `em wait.”

The longest book I’ve written, Beyond the Western Sea, was my attempt to write a Victorian-like saga. At 675 pages there was nothing of that length in the children’s book world in the pre Harry Potter era, 1995. Indeed I decided to write the book in short chapters, with each chapter having a cliff-hanging ending, so as to propel my readers to read just one more, as if had been written for serialization. [In fact, the publisher was so nervous about the book’s length that they issued it in two volumes, which proved to be a mistake.] When the book was done it came to my mind that I might try to do actual serialization in newspapers. That was the birth of Breakfast Serials.

Breakfast Serials logo

 

Why did serialization become so popular? In the 19th Century, literacy was spreading among masses of people. Buying serial installments was a lot cheaper than buying a book. More than that, a serialized story means, beyond all else, a shared story. Social reading. Think of the book club experience, but multiply it by thousands! Think what a relief it is (say in a classroom) not to have the fast reader spoil the book for the slow reader by announcing what happens next. They can’t, because no one knows. Readers are always on the same page.

To be continued …

Serialized Fiction

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Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick ClubWilliam Hall, of the British publishing company Chapman and Hall, wished to publish a monthly series of cartoons by the illustrator Robert Seymour, about the “Nimrod Club,” the comic misadventures of a group of Cockney sportsmen. The cartoons would be the main thing, (think of Hogarth’s The Good Apprentice, etc.) but there would be some subsidiary text, which would supplied by a young writer, who had recently achieved some success. The writer was Charles Dickens. In 1836, shortly after the first installment was published, having been retitled The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, Seymour committed suicide. In an effort to salvage the project, Dickens, with his publishers, undertook to enlarge the amount of text for the installments, even while a new illustrator was found. The project—the first time a new novel was being serialized–was an extraordinary success. How successful? Some four hundred copies of the first installment were published. As for the last installment, some forty thousand copies were published. Not only had a new writer—Charles Dickens—achieved fame, a new form of publication was also established—serialization. Why am I writing about this? Because one of my books is currently being serialized.

To be continued . . . .