Does anyone have experience writing serials, and if so, what are they?
I’m getting mixed reviews. Some have said that they are a great way to pull in readers, for instance. Others note they haven’t noticed a difference, or that it had the reverse effect - you lose readers as the series go on, and new people are put off by having to go back to the beginning. What’s your experience?
How do you keep it going? Long works are not my best suit.
Keep it flowing and always leave the end of each chapter end as a cliff hanger of some type. It keeps the readers wanting to read and leaves them wanting more. As soon as the action slows down (be it drama, action, terror, etc) then you will lose people’s interest to continue to read.
That really doesn’t work if each installment is episodic in nature, rather than based on a tight serialized plot.
So far the only things I want to actually do are more like TV shows that don’t really have a tight episode-to-episode plot.
I bring that up because TV is really the only experience I have with a series or serialized writing. Well, that and things like Sherlock Holmes which, much like TV shows, are self-contained stories. Even chaptered books don’t have every chapter ending like that. So I don’t really think I can pull that off, not at the first go anyhow.
I’m one of those people on the flip side of the coin, where I find shows that each episode having one completely contained story bores me. Take the X-Files. Granted, as a lot of people know by now I’m not a huge sci-fi fan, but the show was somewhat interesting when it actually moved along the plot a little bit. I understand having some episodes that are self-contained stories (as it’s kind of the point of the show), but I found myself quitting out of nearly 80% of the episodes because the episode seemed pointless.
Basically, if you could work in a way to have each installment of the series to be a self contained story while providing something to forward the plot of the main story, that would probably draw in the most readers.
Well, there’s a “serial” in the sense of individual stories and a serial in the sense of individual acts. Acts other than the last one should – maybe even have to! – end on a point that makes a reader want to know what happens next. In a TV show, generally the act divisions run from commercial break to commercial break. (TV shows often start with a “teaser” before the first act and commercial break and very often end with a “tag” after the final act; in series that have long arcs, the tag usually delivers some kind of weird twist that advances the arc story.)
So: it sounds like you’re talking about complete stories that are related, right? I suspect in that case the feedback you’ve gotten is probably all correct. 
Series do tend to draw in readers, and everyone I’ve talked to has suggested that having more work available for purchase has a cumulative effect: if you have ten books available for purchase, you’re probably going to sell more copies of all of them then you would if you had only two, because people who like one book in a series will very often buy all of them as long as that’s not too expensive to do. But the catch there is of course that the more books are available the more expensive buying all of them is, and unless you kill your own series on a high note, I imagine sales will start tapering off.
Of course, if you’re talking about releasing stuff for free, that’s a bit of a different animal. I imagine reader fatigue and disappointment can still set in the longer any series goes, but cost stops being a concern.
I am specifically talking about free series posted online, for the sole purpose of drawing in more readers. I’m looking for discussions of author experiences writing them, from if they bring in readers, as well as how to do them, etc.
At this time I am struggling to write a full book, a full series of books would melt my brain.
However Chipotle you do give me an idea. You mention that TV shows provide a teaser at the end of the show to tell you what’s going to happen next. If the story doesn’t end on a cliff hanger, it’s very, very easy to provide a teaser for the next installment to serve as the pull to get people wanting to come back.
I’ve taken the TV format to heart and have patterned my 9-book series after it.
Each chapter is episodic, even to the extent of having three major scene breaks in each chapter to denote three commercial breaks.
This isn’t really evident in the books themselves, and the story can still be enjoyed. But it greatly helps my writing process in establishing a structure for each chapter (two main acts, and two smaller acts), and would facilitate its translation to becoming an actual TV show
I was heavily influenced by soap operas and their constant delayed gratification and the “endless middle” storytelling. If you make the story compelling, the audience should be willing to keep following along.