As a quick follow up to my post last week, “The End of Paper Media“, I wanted to share an article that Stan Hummel recommended to me called “With Apple’s Novel Acquisition, A Chance To Reinvent The Book“, by Danny Crichton. Crichton suggests that in a digital world, we might see a return to an era of serialized fiction, and I’m quite intrigued by the idea.
I suggested last week that the publishing industry as we know it today isn’t quite the long entrenched tradition we might think it is. Much in the way that people bemoan the fall of the music recording industry, when we bemoan the fall of the publishing industry, we’re not mourning something original and essential to the production of art, but something rather recent. We don’t need to look too far back in our history to see that the wide availability of books for purchase is a new development. Traditionally, not everyone got their writing published in the “traditional” way, because there simply wasn’t a market for them. Chaucer recited his poetry to the Court, including revised versions of stories written by others. Rousseau earned himself fame by winning an essay contest. Dickens wrote in serialized segments.
It might be pretty cool to return to these methods of publishing, much as musicians have returned to a dependence on tours and patronage for funding through Kickstarter and Patreon. Writers (and many others, of course) use these services also, but there’s still some ground left to cover in developing these as solid platforms for writers, and I’m not sure how financially feasible it is to try and “do a Dickens” – that is, publish in segments over time. I think it would be fun to see my Pirate Poem meted out in segments, with little cliff hangers and episodes, but I’d have to think it through.
Perhaps something like Booklamp (the product Apple acquires in the linked article) is the answer to this particular conundrum. I’m optimistic that someone will figure this out, even if I cannot.
And as a reminder that we’re not the first to wring our hands in earnest consternation over what technology will do to art and communication, The Atlantic has a great piece on the initial reception of the telegraph. Check out “In 1858, People Said the Telegraph Was ‘Too Fast for the Truth’“, by Adrienne Lafrance.
Stories & Soliloquies 
10 thoughts on “Doing a Dickens”
SelfAwarePatterns
Meant to comment on this when I saw you and Stan’s twitter conversation, but it kept slipping through the cracks. Now I’ll just do it here.
I think digital publishing is going to bring big changes to the way things are published. Right now, due to inertia, the digital books are more or less still in the shape of their print versions, but I suspect that’s going to change.
On serialized fiction, it’s worth noting that that’s what trilogies and larger book series actually are, just in bigger chunks than what Dickens did. Digital publishing will allow those chunks to shrink again. There’s already some experimentation going on. John Scalzi published his novel, ‘The Human Division’, in serialized form, although he subsequently published it in one book.
The other thing that digital publishing is making possible is publishing of novellas by themselves. It used to be that you had to find the anthology that they were in, similar to how we used to have to buy an entire music album to get the one or two songs we liked. Now we can (usually) buy individual songs, and it’s becoming more common for us to buy individual novellas and even individual short stories.
All of this is going to broaden possibilities of the written art form, which I see as a major positive.
Michelle Joelle
Great analogy (songs/albums), and great comments. I share your positivity on this – I love books and always will (and they will pry my way too large home library from my cold dead fingers), but they’re not the best medium for every kind of reading or marketing. I still buy albums too!
bryanajoy
Well, the fears about the telegraph were well-founded, I think :).
Michelle Joelle
Forewarned is forearmed! 🙂
s7hummel
thanks for this beautiful approach to the problem… but since i have nothing more clever to say, so keep silence! in addition, is a very complicated discussion with Michael. if this isn’t explained, it may be that disappeared us a little bit of this beautiful universe! and it was supposed to really tragic consequences!
Michelle Joelle
I’m staying positive! I don’t think that digital publishing will be the death knell of “traditional” publishing, but instead expand possible markets and open doors for people who may not necessarily be fit to write “books” per se but are still fit to be writers!
Nimue Brown
I think we might see a return of subscription publishing – kickstarter is a bit like that, but I think we could have more book-orientated models that are more about the book and less about getting bogged down in ‘perks’.
Michelle Joelle
I wonder if Patreon would be a better fit? I’ve looked around a bit at it, but I’m still familiarizing myself and would love another perspective!
Nimue Brown
We’re considering using it, I think it has best utility for things given away freely – blogs, webcomics, youtube videos, where people support because they like it, rather than things like books with more upfront costs…but I am guessing.
James Pailly
I’ve been “doing a Dickens” with my Tomorrow News Network series. I know several other authors trying to do similar things with varying levels of success. I agree that something like that model is returning, though I still think we need to figure out the details.