I’ve been thinking about this for a while. Which of my stories should I serialize now?

Back when I first started posting The Tally Master on Wednesdays, scene by scene, I imagined myself choosing another of my novels after it, perhaps Caught in Amber. But as The Tally Master unspooled week by week, I began to think again. You see, I hadn’t ever counted the number of scenes in Tally.

I did a rough estimate then and discovered that there were over 100. It was going to take almost two years to post the entire novel! Maybe I should choose one of my short stories next. “Perilous Chance” might be good. How many scenes were in that?

Fifteen. Fifteen scenes seems too short. Plus I like to reserve my shorts as special bonuses that my newsletter subscribers receive at times.

Clearly I should choose a novella.

I’d almost settled on Hunting Wild, when I noticed something about The Tally Master serial. The number of readers reading it was dropping, while the number of purchases of the book was rising. This was actually a very nice thing to see: readers were abandoning the serial because they wanted to read the story faster than it was appearing on my blog. Yay!

The question was: would fresh readers jump aboard the serial? The chapters remained up, starting with chapter one, so they could.

But they didn’t. By the time I reached the halfway mark, all the serial readers had purchased either the ebook or the paperback. Except there was a decent chance I had a few stealth serial readers. Not every page view on my website shows up on my dashboard. If I stopped posting scenes, I might cut off the story in the middle for a few hidden readers, and I’d never want to do that to anybody!

Plus there was always the possibility that some unknown future reader would stumble across my website five years from now and start reading. They’d be so disappointed if the story came to an abrupt halt in the middle. I had to keep going.

So I posted week after week, but never did see actual evidence of readers. Probably there were a few. If any of you stealth readers are reading this post…I did it for you! All the way to the end! 😀

I probably will do another serial at some point. It was really cool to watch as readers leapt from the serial to the ebook or the paperback! But for now I’m taking a break from serializing anything. The Wednesday Serial is officially on hiatus.

If you missed The Tally Master, here’s the beginning of the serial: The Tally Master, Chapter 1 (scene 1). Check it out!