In next week's thrilling episode!

Wondering about releasing novellas in multiple parts

Several of my current projects seem to have ended up as novella length. There’s not enough material for a full-length novel, and adding more would make them bloated. I could collect several of them together and make a book out of them, but they’re all sufficiently different from each other that they don’t really belong in the same volume. So I’ve been wondering about the best way to publish them.

One of the greatest things about ebooks is that length doesn’t really matter. You can publish a novella as a stand-alone volume, and it’s not a problem. It’s just a short book, and I’m a big fan of short books. But I found myself wondering about publishing each chapter separately, roughly one a week.

But… doesn’t episodic content suck?

As a kid, I loved episodic content. Doctor Who was extra exciting because you had to wait until next week to find out how he was going to escape. It didn’t matter that he was never in real peril: of course he would get out of it somehow. Comics were the same, whether we’re talking about Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog, or newspaper strips like Garth or Modesty Blaise. Cliffhangers, every time.

Arguably, many the most successful TV shows today all rely on making viewers wait. Only Murders In The Building, Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, The Mandalorian… none of them drop an entire season in a day. It’s an important part of their storytelling, creating suspense and then leaving us hanging for a week. (And, of course, it keeps viewers subscribing. It’s a financial decision, not just a creative one.)

Let’s not forget, that’s how Dickens published most of his stories. They weren’t originally written as novels - they were monthly serials, dribbled out one chapter at a time. They were only collected into single volumes later.

And if you really want examples of how successful episodic content can be, just look at soap operas like Days of Their Lives (almost 15,000 episodes), General Hospital (almost 16,000 episodes) or Coronation Street (11,000 episodes). What’s more, they’re all still in production, and still attracting viewers every single week after more than sixty years.

But also, episodic content allows you to take the story at a slower, more measured pace. You can read, or watch, or listen to, a little at a time. You can fit in a little bit of entertainment here or there: you can’t just binge it all in one go. Read the latest chapter of a story over breakfast, or listen to this week’s episode of a podcast as you do the dishes, and then move on to something else. As a result, you have time to savor it.

It’s a matter of commitment - from the author

That said, episodic content can - and frequently does - suck. What I really dislike is when you have to wait too long for the next episode or, worse, when the next episode never comes out. (Yeah, looking at you, George RR Martin! And at all those Netflix shows that ended a season on a cliffhanger and were then canceled. Grrr.) If I’m embarking on a serial story, I want to know that it will actually reach a satisfying conclusion, and it won’t leave me waiting for a ridiculous length of time in the middle.

In my mind, there’s a significant difference between content that’s being released before it’s finished, and episodic content that breaks up a completed story into bite-size chunks for release.

In the first case, the reader is being asked to trust that if they start the story now, it will actually get finished later. They have to trust that it will follow a predefined narrative arc, and it will be consistent in style. It won’t start drifting off to something else, or drag on interminably. That’s a big ask, given how many stories fail to do that. (Lost, for example.)

But in the second case, the story is already written, and it’s an editorial decision to split it into smaller parts in order to create an interesting experience for the reader. (Or, equally importantly, break it into more affordable chunks.) The reader knows that the story is finished, they’re just getting their hands on it a bit at a time. That’s a whole different experience. It’s like eating in a Chinese restaurant and having a series of courses brought to you, rather than having all the dishes put on the table at once. It takes longer, but you get to enjoy the experience of having a meal, not just eating the food.

Episodic novellas are like mini-series

I probably wouldn’t release a full-length novel this way, but novellas seem to lend themselves perfectly to the serial format. (As I finally realized, there’s a reason Amazon’s partworks system is called Kindle Vella. Duh.) Novellas are too long to be short stories, but they’re too short to be novels. However, you can easily break them up into, say, four or five episodes, each roughly short story length. If you release them in weekly parts, the story is complete in about a month. The reader isn’t waiting for ever for the story to end, but they do get that little frisson of excitement when a new part comes out.

This also lends itself to a nice budget model. You give away the first episode, then charge $0.99 for the remaining episodes. That’s a lot more attractive to a new reader than asking them to pay $1.99 or $2.99 for a short book from an unknown author. Once it’s complete and you have some early reviews, then you can, of course, compile all the parts into a single volume and re-release it. And then you can combine several novellas into a full-length book, giving you a yet another format.

So that’s what I’m toying with doing. I think if I go that route, Mrs Patel and the Secret Agent will end up as four episodes, and The Yellow Flowers will probably be eight or ten, depending on how the next rewrite goes. I’m either going to end up stripping a lot of it out, or else rewriting some of the weaker parts and building them out into something more satisfying.

However, this also adds one extra dimension to the editing process. I need to be very conscious of the ending of each segment, ensuring that readers will want to come back. Mrs Patel, fortunately, seems to break up that way naturally: each of the four chapters ended very neatly, looking forward to what was coming next. Yellow Flowers, however, will need some reworking so that it fits into a serial structure: paradoxically, I think this could be what it needs to turn it from its present state of “mediocre but has potential” to “worth reading”.

My biggest stumbling block, though, is that as a mostly unknown author, I’m not sure whether I’d find an audience for a series in this format. If I had a thousand fans via newsletters and social media, I’m sure it would work: there would almost certainly be enough interest from existing readers to take a look at what I’ve been working on. But without that launching pad? I’m not convinced. I guess I’ll make a decision at publishing time.

I’d love to know what readers think of the idea of episodic books. Would you read a story that came out in parts? And if so, how much would you expect in each part to make it a satisfying experience? How often would you want new episodes? Would it depend on the type of story?