Guest Post by Susan Helene Gotfried

Please welcome Susan Helene Gotfriend this week as she talks to us about serial fiction.

When I began blogging back in 2006, there weren’t a lot of people involved with online serials. In fact, back then, the blogosphere was alive with charges that posting fiction online was the same as publishing your fiction, and why would you do that if you wanted to make money from your writing? People, probably seeking to be helpful, out-and-out told me I was a fool. I didn’t care. I wanted to use these snippets of fiction — call them flash, call them outtakes as I used to, call them what you will — to prove to agents and editors that a readership existed for Trevor and the gang.

That readership was there, all right, but not in the way I’d been expecting. Instead of attracting agents and editors, my readers told me they wanted something different. Sure, they were dying for the novel I’d been promising (Trevor’s Song, finally released in 2010), but they also wanted a physical book that contained all the fiction I’d been posting.

In 2008, two years after I began my blog, I released my first book, ShapeShifter: The Demo Tapes (Year 1). Three years later, it still sells well.

Over those three years, I’ve seen a lot of changes happen in the area of serial fiction. The biggest change has been an acceptance of the practice. Those dire warnings of ruined careers have ceased; no one’s predicting an utter lack of literary success because I chose to post flash fiction featuring the characters from my novels.

I’ve even seen entire blogs devoted to serial fiction and while many of them have been flash-in-the-pan events, author Alice Audrey’s got a great thing going at her blog, Alice’s Restaurant. She keeps a linkie in her sidebar and once a week reminds us serial writers to post our links. To keep us active and involved, she goes to the trouble of featuring one of the participating authors.

What a world of difference. I love it.

Part of this success can be attributed to the way blogging has evolved. Thanks to the e-book revolution and the ease of self-publishing, more and more authors are jockeying for visibility. Twitter has helped, with the #amwriting hash tag and the more pointed #SundaySnippet and #FridayFlash communities.

Mostly, though, I think that the change came about because of us brave pioneers, who proved that posting serials wasn’t the death knell at all. It was an opportunity, and it’s one I’m glad I was brave enough to seize.

I have to say that the authors who are able to write a linear story and keep it going from week to week leave me in awe. They have the creativity, the characters, the vision, and mostly the organization and discipline to make it happen. The aforementioned Alice Audrey is on episode 242 of her serial, Suzie’s House, as I write this. That’s four-and-a-half YEARS of posts. It’s spawned books, too, which I hope to read one day soon.

For me as a serial writer, I’m not nearly that organized. I’ve got the characters, but leave things mostly up to my whim and inspiration. That was where the clamor for the Demo Tapes books came from: my readers wanted better organization. They wanted to trace the lives of Trevor Wolff and his best friend, Mitchell Voss, from the time they meet until their band, ShapeShifter, reaches a pretty high pinnacle of success.

Over the years, I’ve created more characters, with more tales to tell. There’s Springer, the hapless ShapeShifter fan. There’s Pam, the groupie. Chelle LaFleur covers music for the Trumpet, a newspaper as fictional as she is. She rants in a voice all her own. There are others, as well, but so far, none as celebrated as the Roadie Poet. The clamor is growing for him to star in his own book, and I shall provide it as soon as I have enough poems to fill a nice-sized volume.

All this means, folks, is that serial fiction is alive and well. Why not take the plunge?

Thank you, Susan!

You can find Susan and her work at the following sites:

West of Mars

Susan’s books

Or follow Susan on Facebook