Serial novel. Sweet, funny, fast-paced — perfect to read with a cup of coffee (or glass of wine!)

Six weeks.

Hard to believe!

But that’s how long it’s been since the release of Chapter 1 of my new serial novel, The French Emerald.

It’s been an interesting experiment. I’ve been pushing notifications of new chapters out to my email list and on the Tuesday Serial Linky aggregator here. The book is also running in some regional newspapers (please say “hi” in the comments if you found me that way!)

If you haven’t seen any of the story yet and would like to take a peek, you can start on chapter 1 here.

The most unexpected aspect of doing all this? How complicated it is to set up all the files.

Mind you, I completed the entire novel before I published the first chapter. There are 43 chapters in all — and each chapter has a reminder of last week’s chapter and a teaser for the next week. So even before I put the first one out, I was dealing privately with questions about managing 43 files in a way that would let me tee them up for week-by-week release–not to mention help me keep them all straight =0

That, it turns out, was the easy part. Year 2018 and it’s still a PIA, if I may be blunt! to transfer formatted text across apps. I wrote the book in Word, and it’s impossible to paste it into WordPress without having to re-do the formatting. (Maybe if you use localized formatting it would work, but I use Styles, because in theory that will make it easier later to import the book into InDesign for print. So my Word files come over to WP with zero formatting.) For my email version (using Mailchimp for that) I have to copy/paste and reformat again.

Then there’s the links, since all the chapters in every version have to be cross linked so people can move from one chapter to the next. I just now realized some of the links in the first few chapters of the website version were broken. Sorry if you ran into that — fixed now :/

And then there’s the scheduling! It’s a lot easier to write a post, like this one, and hit “publish.” With the serial novel, I’m prepping chapters in batches and scheduling their release. So I live in terror* of accidentally releasing chapters out of order, or tweeting a chapter link before it’s officially published.

All the same, I’m enjoying it.

And I believe the serialized novel is poised for a resurgence. Microfiction, baby. Let’s do this thing.

*Well, okay, maybe not terror, exactly. More a state of being resigned to constant low-level anxiety. hahahahahaha