Serial Novels
Serialized novels are novels published in installments rather than as a single unit. Historically, these installments were distributed in newspapers or magazines, but now they exist in a variety of forms, many of which are digital.
Historical
Publication
Serial novels arose with the invention of movable type and the printing press, but did not become popular until the eighteenth century, at which point they became distributed either as part of existing magazines or newspapers or independently in the form of direct-to-consumer teasers and samples. Serial novels quickly became a way for publishers to reduce the investment and risk in producing books. Publishing stories serially a fragment at a time allowed publishers to gauge popularity and readership, offering the ability to pull the plug on an unsuccessful story without having produced a bound volume to sell. Conversely, excitement could be generated for a novel before its completion, driving up sales. As libraries and collections simultaneously rose in popularity, publishers further serialized into a profitable three-step publishing process: the initial serial form, a library-edition collection divided into multiple books, and the singular bound novel.
Into the late nineteenth century, the serial novel became the seminal form of literature in the United States and Great Britain in particular. Authors who were serialized first became seen as more skillful than authors who published bound novels first, as serialized authors had faced the arena of public opinion and been deemed of quality. Many pieces of classical literature are associated with the serial form, most famously all of the works of Charles Dickens. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.
The slow decline of the serial novel was eventually brought on by the emergence of other serialized fiction formats like radio in the twentieth century. The audience of serial fiction magazines moved to other formats. The serial novel never completely died out, but it did not enjoy the success it had just a century before.
Cultural Conceptions
The rise of the serial novel coincided with the rise of the concept of copyright, from which emerged a recognition of the writer as artist. Prior to copyright and the serial novel, texts were often anonymously authored and publicly shared, and writers earned little money or recognition. Publishers held full rights to an author's work when the concept of copyright first emerged. However, with the serial novel, readers were presented with the names of the people who had authored their stories. In fact, authors' names became selling points for serial fiction. Copyright for stories began to move into the hands of their authors.
Writing with serialization in mind became a deliberate part of the creative process for many authors, affecting how they chose to craft their work. Part of this was reckoning with the regular publishing schedule, always demanding the next installment as soon as the last had finished. The speed and volume of an author's production was often directly correlated with their popularity and their publisher's favor, creating pressure. The serial novel also developed its own (intentional and unintentional) style conventions due to the format of its publication. Cliffhangers at the end of installments were integral to cultivating reader interest. Due to stories' length and frequent lack of pre-planning historically, or mid-run extensions of stories, the plots of serial novels often were inconsistent in intensity and quality and contradicted themselves over time. Stories might end suddenly due to a publisher cut-off, causing an abrupt or unresolved ending, or might be drawn out extensively due to popularity, making them difficult to end neatly. Deus ex machinae are common among serial novels in part because of this. Serial novelists were also often paid by the word, incentivizing lengthy descriptions, dialogues, and plots.
Archives
The first 68 issues of The Strand, spanning 1891 to 1924, can be viewed as page scans or text files online in the HathiTrust digital library. The physical copies of these issues are housed in the libraries of multiple American universities.[1]
Additionally, many Victorian serial fiction magazines are archived in the Internet Archive.[2] Magazines can be filtered by author, year of publication, and collection. Each issue is presented as a scan with page-turning functionality, below which is presented publisher and technological information. The University of Victoria also houses many virtual copies of Victorian serial novels.
The Dickens Digital Notes Project [3] is an archive-in-process of what survives of Charles Dickens's notes on his novels. Led by Anna Gibson and Adam Grener, the project began transcribing the notes of the first of the ten novels for which Dickens's notes survive, Our Mutual Friend, in 2017. The Manuscript History section logs the history of the notes and their study.
Contemporary
Serialized writing has seen a partial revival with the emergence of digital technologies and the Internet. In the modern cultural lexicon, the term "author" is primarily reserved for those who publish in book form (especially when printed, bound, and published through a traditional publishing house). However, aspiring authors frequently publish their content serially online for free, often through major social media sites or sites specifically for serialized fiction, such as Wattpad and Fictionpress. Fanfiction especially acts as a form of serial fiction, with authors publishing stories chapter by chapter online as they are written. Webtoons and Tapas similarly house manga and graphic novels, with the former also offering written fiction. Authors of popular online serials, like Worm and Homestuck, will often receive bids from publishing houses interested in publishing official hard copies of the serial, making virtual serial fiction a potential conduit to publication and fame.
Platforms for selling serial fiction have also arisen online. Some, like Plympton and the failed Amazon endeavor Kindle Serials[4], operate on pay-per-installment or book structures, while others like Rooster utilize a subscription model in the vein of many music and television streaming services (Serial Box is another popular serial fiction company which follows both models).
On occasion, traditionally-published authors have experimented with releasing serial fiction, including Margaret Atwood and Stephen King. Established authors vary in many regards in their approach to serialized fiction - publishing online and in traditional newspapers and magazines, writing new content and redistributing old works, distributing for free and charging (and doing both, as King did with his novel The Plant. Much like the most successful serials in Victorian magazines, these serial works are often published later as a bound book, such as in the case of Atwood's The Heart Goes Last, which may be used to increase sales. Often serialized literature released by established authors is regarded as a similar artistic analog to the vinyl record or cassette tape, the format used as much for its own sake as it is for its affordances.
While many media emulate the serialized format of the serial novel, such as podcasts, many have shifted to a release model which more closely resembles that of the bound book. This is most notable in television, which originated as a weekly serialized form of media. When streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu emerged, seasons of television series were frequently released in their entirety at one time, much like a bound book. Television is being increasingly designed to be consumed in one sitting as well, abandoning both the serialized release and experience. Releasing a show one episode at a time became a highly deliberate choice, one which many viewers expressed annoyance with. However, this trend has recently been reversing, with streaming services withholding their most successful shows in favor of serialized release[5]. Returning to an episodic release schedule allows production companies to build anticipation - frequently documented through live-tweeting - between installments, much like publishers historically have done with serial novels.
Books Referenced
Borsuk, Amaranth (2018). The Book. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-53541-0.
Lund, Michael (1993). America's Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850-1900. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. ISBN 0-8143-2401-0.