Josh came up with an interesting idea the other day. Instead of monthly we should publish quarterly. Primarily, this is to make this more profitable, since we won’t lose as much in Fictionwise conversion fees. While I’m glad to have Fictionwise as a distribution partner, between their cut of the sale price and ebook conversion fees, Josh and I don’t make enough in fiction sales to cover our own site hosting. It also opens up some interesting story potential if I structure UC as 4 3-act stories per volume.
Or, I could take Josh’s reasoning one step further and publish annually, each volume as a separate novel. With the rewrites I’m doing on my original, now four-year-old draft of each UC chapter, I’m up to 7,000 words per issue. Multiply that out by 12 issues and I’ve got a full-length 84,000 word novel. While this would work even better for Fictionwise’s system, it’s also more like what “real” novelists do.
I mean, that’s the idea, right? Crank out a book a year. Of course I’d continue this blog, and there would obviously be no book tours or anything, but a book a year is what novelists do.
Except…
One of the things I’d really hoped to do with both serials and this blog is maintain a conversation with my readers. The appeal of a monthly, or even quarterly, release schedule is that I could get feedback about the story as I wrote it. I loved that Joe Straczynski participated on Usenet while Babylon 5 was in production. Not only was it an enlightening look at the behind-the-scenes writing process, but it made me feel that much closer to the show. The only problem was that because of the time it takes to produce a TV show, by the time we saw an episode and Joe could talk about it, it had been months since he wrote it.
Josh and I had the opportunity to do something different here. To not only have readers almost looking over our shoulders as we write, but to discuss the story with out readers while it’s still it’s still fresh to us as well. To me, this was worth losing out on the money up front from Fictionwise (admittedly, mostly because I’ve always planned on repackaging each of the seven planned volumes of UC as standalone ebooks and possibly even paperbacks). I really wanted to see how this would work.
But so far, I’ve been disappointed. Maybe we didn’t give it enough time to develop, maybe we didn’t stick around long enough, but so far the conversation has been pretty sparse. While the more mobile tech focused Writing On Your Palm is doing well, I’m not sure I’ve even had a single comment on this blog, and the number of readers that I’ve talked to via email or our old forums number in the single digits.
So really, why make this harder than it has to be? Publishing monthly or even quarterly is very much performing without a net, making it much harder to go back and make corrections if something doesn’t work out. I have the opportunity to avoid the kind of compromises that rushed the fourth season of Babylon 5 and left the fifth stretched too far. Publishing a book a year, I can write at my own hot-and-cold pace, I can polish and correct as needed, and ultimately put out a better story.
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