March 15, 2006
Serial Killer: 6 Rules for Serializing Novels Online
Update: It looks like The Unbinding now gives you the option to switch your background from black to white -- which is a huge help. Now if they'd give it its own RSS feed, create a flash and popup free version (maybe on a blog somewhere), and give those paragraphs some padding, most of what I'm whining about in the post below would be fixed. (Except the bit about Steven King)
On Monday Slate launched a serial novel by Walter Kirn, and while the book looks promising enough (Walter Kirn's no slouch) the site is a disaster. Somehow Slate has managed to excise all of the design techniques that actually make serial novels practical and fun to read online.
For the last few years I've been publishing Dave Wellington's serial novels online (plug, plug, plug) and I've found that there are some simple rules to making them work.
#1, RSS
A serial novel needs an RSS feed. The feed should include a list of chapters and nothing else. That way when a reader subscribes to a book's feed you're giving them a table of contents that updates itself.
On Slate, if you subscribe to the RSS feed to The Unbinding you wind up subscribing to Slate's complete feed; it's impossible to subscribe to the book on its own. There are enough distractions on the web already, who has time to dig through Slate’s RSS to track down the latest chapter?
#2, Email Notifications
A web serial should give you the option to get email updates every time a chapter is posted. Much as I love him, I'm not going to remember to go to Slate every fifth day to check up on Walter Kirn. If I'm interested, I'll sign up for email, and if I'm going to commit to reading the book, I'll actually open them when they arrive.
#3, Attend to the type!
There are rules to type design for the web, and a serial novel should follow them. (You can find The Element's of Typographic Style applied to the Web here .) I'm no design purist – I don't really care if a page is perfectly kerned, or uses pixels instead of ems – but the page should be comfortable to read.
The Unbinding manages to break nearly every rule of good type design there is. There’s white text on a black background, paragraphs that run into the margins, lines that aren't spaced properly. There’s even a Cylon-style scrolling red dot that drifts back and forth in a frame across the top of the page to distract you from reading. After reading a few pages of this your eyes will actually dilate and fall out of your head.
#4, Pagination
Pagination is important with a serial novel. It should be easy to click from one page to the next, and to navigate through chapters. But most importantly, it should be easy to bookmark the latest chapter so you can quickly open the book. That's why they call 'em bookmarks, after all.
To get to the current chapter of The Unbinding you have to scan through Slate's home page to find the link, then click it to go to a pointless launch page, then install flash if you don’t have it (so long readers, hello Cylon!), then click to pop-up the site, and then click the latest chapter on the left column. (whew) And if you want to print the page you’ll have to scroll all the way to the bottom and download a PDF file since the frame prevents you from printing normally.
This is not reading, this is work. It's like having a book that you have to tap and flip over six times before you can to read a chapter.
(You can sneak around most of at this page – but Slate didn't build the site so you could access it this way easily, and you still have to scroll to print)
#5 Accessibility
A good novel is perfect for the web because it’s just text. You don't need Cylons to sex it up. You don’t need videos or audio. The text alone works just fine. People check the web on cell phones, on Blackberries, on computers that don't have Flash installed. Half of the readers of Monster Island read the book at work, behind firewalls on pared down computers. When you build the serial using css and structured HTML you open the book up to all those ways of reading it. I'm not saying the code needs to be perfect, but it should fall apart nicely.
Slate's page is built so that excludes readers. If you're at work, or check the web from a phone, or have an old computer, or don't have flash, or have pop-ups disabled, you're out of luck.
#6 A serial novel should be a serial novel.
There’s a basic rule to a serial novel, which is that nearly every chapter should end with a cliffhanger. This isn’t always appropriate for literary fiction, but not all fiction is appropriate for serialization. I recently read the first chapter of a web serial that ended with the line:
"And Alan Krieger, RN, waddled out the door like an endomorphic Gary Cooper."
Far be it from me to criticize literary fiction, but that line isn’t going to get anyone to tune in next week.
This shouldn’t really be a mystery to writers – it’s the same technique 24, and Lost, and the Sopranos use week after week. (O.M.F.G they shot him!) Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft, Steven King, all wrote serials. If the book doesn't at least follow some of the plotting techniques they use, it's not going to work.
It's hard to say what's going to come out of The Unbinding. Kirn is an excellent novelist, and Slate claims he's writing in real time. But their description of the book has me worried:
“ The Unbinding, a dark comedy set in the near future, is a compilation of "found documents"—online diary entries, e-mails, surveillance reports, etc.”
Why is it that editors think we web people want to spend our time sifting through documents? What reader says, “you know, I’d like to sit in bed and sift through some surveillance reports for a few hours to relax.” Serial fiction is a well established form, there's no reason to change it.
I hope Kirn works it out though, because there are plenty of novelists I’d love to read in serial. Imagine if Haruki Murakami or Paul Auster took to the form.
It all comes back to The Plant
When Slate announced the serial, Mehgan O'Rourke wrote:
“Over the past decade, there has been much discussion of the lack of literature being written on the Web. When Stephen King experimented with the medium in the year 2000, publishing a novel online called The Plant, readers were hampered by dial-up access. But the prevalence of broadband and increasing comfort with online reading makes the publication of a novel like The Unbinding possible.”
Everything about that statement is wrong. Dial-up had nothing to do with The Plant's withering. There is not "much discussion about the lack of literature on the web", at least on the web. And there's nothing about the format of The Unbinding that wasn't possible in 2000, (in fact, if they'd bothered to look at web design since 2000 the site could have been much better)
Steven King may have been the worst thing to happen to serial novels on the web. He entered the game early with a lot of fanfare and then pulled out when it turned out people weren’t willing to pay what he thought the books were worth. He asked people to pay for every chapter, he locked the books in PDF files, and he ended the book before it was finished, which ticked off the audience. This was a shame, because King really is the perfect author for serializing online – it’s just that his model was completely wrong.
Since then, every time a brand-name novelist halfheartedly serializes something and fails everyone in the business says it’s because people aren't ready to read books online. Having working on Monster Island, I know this isn't true – you just have to present the book in a way that's easy to read in a format that people are accustomed to using. The original 19 th century serials worked because they were optimized for newsprint, 21st century serials should be optimized for the way people use the web. People check blogs daily, they download pages to their phones, they print them out at work and take them downstairs on a smoke break. There's plenty of room in all that activity to read a serial novel – in fact, that activity is well suited to the mode. But instead of issuing press releases and promising to revolutionize literature, publishers should focus on releasing the books so that people can read them online. It’s easy to get lost in a good book when the book adapts to you.
