Books, novels, and serials OH MY!
I'm writing a book about content...
Back in the Before Times (circa 2019) I decided to write a long fantasy series as serialized novellas to be sold on Kindle Unlimited. For a lot of reasons, that idea died on arrival, but while I was researching how to set that up, I found no helpful information on how to set that up.
Most advice was “think of writing a serialized story like writing a television show, in seasons with each book an episode.” That was enlightening but not helpful in a concrete way.
The breakthrough moment for me was the insight that a serial story is structurally and intrinsically a different form of story than a novel.
Yes, yes, trilogies and series. *flaps hands at you* I know! Bear with me.
We think of trilogies as a collection of three novels. They are connected by a through-line, however direct or tenuous, but they are still three novels.
…or are they?
They are, definitely, three books. But the term “book” is a technical one meaning a specific item. These days, it has become an umbrella term for anything that is book-like, such as physical books, ebooks, audio books, and serialized books. A book can hold any kind of content.
So, back to our trilogy of three books: are they three novels? Maybe.
Maybe not.
The thing is, what we call “a book” did not come into existence because books are how people think or because books are naturally occurring in nature (books don’t grow on trees, KimBoo! - my mother), but because of technological limitations. When stories first started getting written down, paper and ink and human literacy were expensive, rare commodities. Books were incredibly short. Consider how we think of each chapter of the Bible as a “book,” because 6,000 years ago, they were books. The Illiad consists of twenty-four “books,” as well. Collecting books together to make bigger books took a while, and anyway, the oral tradition remained powerful long after writing showed up.
When the printing press came on scene, the technological limitations stopped being hand-scraped vellum worked on by human scribes and became the size and thickness of paper. “Tissue paper” bibles reflect this change, as in order to keep the whole book-of-books in one handy volume (as opposed to one massive block of paper needing its own stand), everything has to be squeezed down as far as possible. Binding thicker books was possible, but was it convenient? No. Books quickly became the basic size and shape they have held for the past 600 years (technically, this form is referred to as a codex, and it is actually very old, but did not become dominant until after the printing press).
A novel is a self-contained, completed story, and over the centuries the form and structure of novels were married to the physical form and structure of books by necessity. If a novel got too long, it was cheaper and less of a financial risk to either edit it down or hack it apart into volumes. Come down to the 20th century, and novels were generally defined as stories between 50,000-150,000 words. Longer than that, and printing costs skyrocket, and even then, chopping a 150,000 word novel into a trilogy is a financial risk for the publisher, since readers are under no obligation to buy the following volumes if they don’t like the first one.
Once you start thinking of “serials” as a specific form of story, though, things change. There are plenty of “multi volume” novels, of course, but I’ve begun to realize that most series we love are actually serials. I’d go so far as to say that it is likely that the majority of trilogies are simply very long novels, but once you get to five or seven or twenty volumes of books, you are probably reading a serial.
Which begs the question: what is a serial?
Well, friends, this is what I’m writing a whole-ass book about. Become an Unstoppable Storyteller is currently being written and a good chunk of the introduction is simply explaining how a serial differs from a novel (of one or multiple volumes).
It’s tricky because the common parlance is that a serial is “anything that is being distributed serially,” including novels, anthologies, composite novels, or Dracula.
I disagree.
The nature of the distribution does not define the form of the content anymore. Chopping up a novel to release it in parts does not, usually, make it a serial (Daily Dracula notwithstanding!), and publishing a serial story in a bunch of book volumes does not make it a novel.
My goal is for Become an Unstoppable Storyteller to be really useful for authors who want to explore storytelling outside of the compact novel form. Whether it is endless, ongoing epics or a collection of stories built up around a framework of world-building or a long-running cozy mystery series, I want to discuss how to approach the form of serials with the same intent we’ve been taught to write other forms such as novels and short stories.
I’ll keep ya’ posted…serially. 😁