Tor.com, Cory Doctorow, & the return of serialized sci-fi.

Recently I found out via twitter that Cory Doctorow is offering his new novel “Makers” for free, which is nothing out of the ordinary, Doctorow has made all of his books 100% freely available through the web for many years now. However, what makes this new novel titled “Makers” different is the distro method which is being used by the books publisher Tor. This novel is being released on the Tor website as a 81 part serial.

(Here is a link to part 1 of 81 for those of you who want to start reading it right away.)

When I saw this I was thrilled. I’ve been a long time reader of comic books, a collector of old pulps (original and re-prints), and a huge fan of serialized fiction in general for a very long time. I’d even go so far as to say that I think the serial is the best delivery method for science fiction, sword and sorcery, fantasy, hard boiled crime / detective fiction, horror, super hero, and adventure stories. The serial has always sucked me in to the story in ways that novels can’t always do… It is almost as if by only giving me a bit of a story at a time I would become MORE hungry for the rest. The wait for that next bit of story made it so rewarding when it finally arrived. Here are two examples that I think will illustrate my point..

I believe that my love of the serial comes mainly from years and years of being an avid comic book reader: With comics there were times where I was ready to break someone’s neck to see what was going to happen next when I would get to the last page of an issue! But when I read graphic novels, or “trade paperbacks” as they are called now-a-days, which contained entire story arcs I never got that same feeling.

The other example I want to talk about was watching Battlestar Galactica each week on T.V. (well on my TiVo really) made me so hungry to find out what happened next… I can’t even put it into words… It was intense. I don’t think that people got the same level of excitement if they bought the DVD box sets. The wait added so a level of satisfaction when a new episode would be aired.

I’m not saying that graphic novels, or DVD box sets are in any way inferior to serialized method of distribution, but I am saying that they are clearly different, and that I happen to enjoy the serial more than the –here is everything in one big slab-- style. Nonetheless, I also realize that there are many people who prefer the slab to the serial.

Today the web makes offering a serial a virtually costless distribution method, there is no paper and ink cost, no shipping costs, no and warehousing costs. The only money that publisher puts out is to pay the author and for their web hosting [bandwidth], which the publisher will have to pay anyway. It is for those reasons that I’m of the belief that offering the content as a serial first then collecting and repackaging all the little units of story to be sold as one big slab is the best way to satisfy the different sorts of content consumers that exist today.

Not only can the serial can be sold via subscription, which creates a new revenue stream for the content publisher, it can also be given away for free on the web as Doctorow is doing. Some people might not see the wisdom in that but Doctorow is not one of those people. As I said earlier in this post, Doctorow has given away most of his content for free via the web and Creative Commons license for a very long time now, and he has not suffered for it. As evidenced by the fact that his freely available work continues to sell enough for publisher to keep paying him to make more content.

Despite the success that Doctorow has enjoyed as a writer, there are still many people who would suggest that he is a bizarre sort of phenomenon, and that most other writers would not benefit from giving away their work for free (as a serial or in any format). To such naysayers Doctorow usually states that he believes a writer’s biggest enemy is obscurity. Making content free via serial on the internet exposes more people to it, which in turn increases the likelihood that more people will buy the slab that collects it all when it becomes available. It also increases Doctorow’s name recognition, which is something that every author wants.

Some people like to argue that making content freely available via the web killed off the newspaper, which was the most classic of serial publications. To such people I would say that fiction and news are very different products. Unlike news fiction does not change after the text is released. The day to day moving and shaking of human beings which is reported to the general reading public by newspapers on the other hand changes all the time. The most current that text / news is the better it is. (He who has the most current news, or “Scoop” wins.) The news that is released via the web is more current than the news that is released as ink on dead trees. In addition to this it is far more easy for most people to get to a website than it is for them to get to news stand (or other place that sells physical news papers.) Portable communication technology has only increased, and will continue to increase, the ease of access to information via the web. Lets look forward not backward.

Tor and Doctorow are on to something here. Publishing is changing, and the ways that people read and interact with text are changing too. Those are facts. One of the most obvious changes is the “shorter attention span” of readers who are use to IMs, Twitter, YouTube videos, and the like. The serial (which is later collected into one single volume) is a way to pump out quality content to those readers who enjoy shorter bursts, with out alienating readers who enjoy a big slap of text that they can move though with out stopping.

The content producers / publishers who realize this and change and meet the readers where they are will enjoy success. The content producers / publishers who maintain an anachronistic mind set will fail.

I’m hoping that this is the start of a trend that other publishers science fiction, fantasy, and other providers of what “pulp fiction” has become (such as Soft Skull Press and Picador Crime) pick up on as well.