What goes around poll

[rolanni]

There's been a sort of movable discussion wandering through a couple writer communities I'm part of, brought on in part by writers who are trying to figure out how best to grow their audience, make a living, and maybe even get a bigger piece of the action.

Not surprisingly, many of these conversations come 'round to web serialization for fun and profit, what works, what doesn't. Some folks are of the opinion that giving one's work away "for free" is always a bad deal for the writer, some folks think that giving work away "for free" is the wave of the future, whereupon we're all gonna starve, some folks think that asking readers to kick in a buck for downloading a novel direct from the author is tacky, some think it's OK, but that no one will pay.

In other words, it's a complicated subject and lots of bright people are struggling to make sense of it, and to figure out how to work current realities to their benefit while simultaneously trying to figure out where current realities are going to take us in one, three, six years.

Now, Steve and I did well with our web serializations. I honestly don't know if that's because of a Paradigm Shift, or because we have Incredibly Cool Fans(TM), or because we were writing a Liaden story -- or a combination of all those factors and a bunch that I haven't thought of.

In the spirit of trying to figure some stuff out myself, I offer the following poll, going from the general to the specific.


[Poll #1381306]

Comments

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any serialized novels with the exception of the ones Baen puts out. Not that I'd be unwilling to read any others, I just haven't yet.

If I'm going to receive a completed copy of the book, that's not exactly a donation, is it? That said, I would be willing to donate, and I would be willing to donate more for an autographed hard copy if that's a possibility. I don't care what format of hard copy.

Regular updates would be nice, but with some flexibility built in. "First week of the month" as opposed to "first of the month", for instance. Life interferes, cats get sick, authors have cons, all sorts of things can mess up scheduling. I'd personally rather wait a couple more days for something you'd be willing to have someone else see, instead of on-time but something you wouldn't want your reflection to see.

How much would it be a pain to you, to have people discussing your works in progress? Would the money be worth the trouble to you?

[adina-atl.livejournal.com]

I agree on the flexibility, because as you said, life interferes. The way Steve and Sharon have done it with Fledgling works rather nicely--regular updates, notice in advance that an update won't happen because of whatever, very rarely a day late but never a dollar short. Having said that, I think authors need to take a good, long, hard look at themselves and their work habits: if the author's life frequently interferes, they should finish the damn book before starting to serialize it.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

How much would it be a pain to you, to have people discussing your works in progress?

Folks discussed both Fledgling and Saltation as they were being written, over in theo_waitley. Sometimes I looked, sometimes I didn't. As long as someone isn't emailing me or ambushing me in some way, I don't much care what people say. Though some of the guesses of what's going to happen next are, um...funny.

Would the money be worth the trouble to you?

The aspect that was the worst on the other projects was the Keeping Track of Subscriptions so that we could be sure that people who had "earned" a book through sufficient donations would get their books. The writing part of it wasn't much trouble -- we are writers, after all.