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Novel / novella published in a blog format?

kentscribe

Acolyte
Hey MS, hope you're all scribing well and this is not a repeat or wrong area.

I was thinking how cool it would be for an established, or even first-time writer to publish their written book in chapters as a sectioned part of their own website blog. Say one post a week / month. Could also be syndicated on a platform like Substack.

Obviously once finished option to download full book digital or purchase print edition.

I would think this would lend itself to scifi fantasy very well as you could also include nice page design or imagery to suit the story, even audio aspects etc. I assumed there would be lots of examples of famous authors or even less well known who had success with this but I can't seem to find many key examples?

I used to follow some webcomics that were released weekly before published in trade but I'm not really aware of any authors who have published novels or novellas in this way - in any genre I mean not just fantasy...
 
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Incanus

Auror
I'm probably the last person who should respond to this.

But I think some new writers are doing well over at the Royal Road website. People post 1 or 2 chapters a week--there are some long-running stories there and lots of readers (apparently).
 
There are indeed plenty of serial platforms out there where people post chapters regularly. It's not an easy path, though it's not harder than any other form of self-publishing. The main things to keep in mind are that consistency is king. To keep people hooked you want to regularly upload chapters, an 1 or 2 a week is really on the low end. 3 is probably the minimum to gain some traction. And some stories lend themselves better to this format than others. Don't just cut up your existing tale and throw it on there in the hopes of finding readers. The structure of the tale is very different if you're going with a serial vs a regular novel.

With that out of the way, it can certainly be done. There's The Wandering Inn, which might count as the longest fantasy tale written (at something like 13 million words), which is a web serial. It's succesful, people enjoy it. So if that's the sort of thing you want to write, then go for it.
 
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