Question...Are Series With 5 Parts Or More Worth It?

I have written some series and have watched the results of many others come in over the past year and it does make me ask the question noted above.

There are some series running far past 30, but to me any of those stories are generally written as 'stand alone' stories, no need to go back and read past chapters to get the full sense of the story.

As an author, and I use the term applying to myself very lightly, I have hesitated to write a series now for some months, knowing that once parts 3 or 4 come along say a week or a month down the road, views and comments drop like a rock in water. I considered making my "Kissing Cousins and Spanking Wives" a series but stopped at 2 just because of this.

Do I have the wrong preception, or do others writers feel the same way? I know one can publish all 8 or 9 parts the same day, but the same drop seems to happen there as well.

CS

I don't think it matters at all, providing you enjoy the process of writing and the feeling of satisfaction that you have achieved what you wanted to.

Personally I'm not a big fan of lengthy series that go on and on and on ... I think it's good to realise where to draw a line and start something new and different.

Ah, a question near and dear to my heart, CS. I write a lot of long stories. They are actually novellas, meaning that the story line is carried from one part to the next for a total that usually exceeds 10,000 words. Thus they are not a "series" which I define as a collection of stand-alone stories with common characters and settings. Think Seinfeld vs. Downton Abbey. Question is: are they worth the effort? They don't do well here. The preference around here appears to be for stand alone stories of 1500-5000 words. Long serials don't get a lot of traffic. My recent COUNTESS AND THE MAGICIAN was very lightly read, for example. Maybe it's because reading on-line is a quick hit experience whereas longer works require snuggling up for an extended time with something more cozy than a desktop. Am I going to change? No. There is a robust commercial market for long works where fully developed plots and characters are very desirable. So I'm no longer bothered that 5 or 6 part novellas do poorly here. But I'd probably publish here anyway because if I get excited about something, I write it, and here I can get immediate feedback.

Most of my series were written as one long story. Sometimes I changed things a bit so it made sense to stop or start there, other times I haven't.

My advise? Finish the series, then post it.

I could be wrong, but I think that if a series is finished before it is posted then it's more likely to read all the way through. All five (or 10, or 20) parts hitting the same day means people have a chance to read through them, knowing that the ends in sight.

There have been some series that I've read as posted, but I often find I miss an update and get behind. Or if there are weeks between postings, I've lost some of the threads of the story and miss things that I wouldn't if I read it all the way through over the course of a day or two.

There's another advantage to finishing it before you post - you can go back. Recently I was working on a story where one paragraph was just too busy. I needed to describe the room, who was in the room, things that those people were doing, and if I used more than one paragraph I felt I breaking the flow of the story. So I went back to near the beginning and introduced the room then. Someone glanced into the room and that handled the description of the room, allowing me to make the later text flow. If that first part was already posted then I wouldn't have been able to change that and I would have needed to do too many things without breaking the flow of the story.


The hardest part of reworking that paragraph was that I have seen others do that without breaking the flow of the story. From Steven Brust's Yendi (a book written in the first person). Important news gets said and the author gives us multiple reactions without breaking the flow of the story in any way. To quote and summarise:
Important Information is said.

"The funniest thing about time is when it doesn't. I'll leave that hanging there for the moment, and let you age while the shadows don't lengthen, if you see what I mean." (rest of the paragraph is the author saying how one character takes the news)

"Now, while the Cycle doesn't run, and the year doesn't fail, and the day gets neither brighter nor darker, and even the candles don't flicker, we begin to see things with a new perspective." (rest of the paragraph is the author saying how another character takes the news)

"The funniest thing about time is when it doesn't. In those moments when it loses itself, and becomes (as, perhaps, all things must) its opposite, it becomes a thing of even greater power than when it is in its old standard tear-down-the-mountains mood."
(paragraph about a third character reacting to the news)

Three vastly different reactions, all grouped together in a way that doesn't interfere with the flow of the story. Seeing how he did it makes me wish I was a better writer.

Mark

I'm not a fan of series, really. I've written a few, mainly where readers have nagged me for new episodes. I feel more confident about my writing now, so generally now say no to anything more than two or three parts. Similarly, I rarely bother reading the "Part 32"-type stories, unless I know each episode works as a standalone.

Mine are. I can't speak for anyone else.

It does depend on whether you're talking about a series that is a larger story broken in into parts like Chard's Shelly stories or something that is a collection of self contained stories that share a setting or characters like my Spank Shop's. As with everything it's really the quality of the work that will make me continue reading or not. I do agree with Goodgulf when you're talking about a story broken into parts that it's less frustrating for the reader to have the whole thing posted at once or at least within short intervals.

I write both, but if the muse strikes and a story has legs and the characters come alive then I really enjoy writing a novella length series. It's really meant to be a novella, but for the requirements of this site I break it into chapters. In a book they would be just that, new chapters, ut on the net they appear as separate parts.
There is no comparison in the satisfaction and enjoyment I get from writing a novella length story, and that from a single story however good.
In my opinion -which I accept is probably not shared by the majority of readers here, characters can really come to life in a longer story and I think that 3 to 5000 words is quite long enough for a short story, and if it exceed that it should be broken into chapters of approx 3 K words.
I also much prefer to read a well constructed serial provided it hangs together as a story.

However its all amatter of personal tastes, and as long as the author accepts that they won't get anywhere near as many comments, but can gt a very satisfying number of reads then it is all amatter of personal preference.

Having said that, in future I shall only be previewing my serials gratis on this site, and intend to publish them as a whole as books for purchase on the LSF site.

Don't give me this "it depends" and "tastes" stuff. If you're going to write a series, it should have four parts, and that's that.

And this is written by an expert in writing serials by the hundreds, so sit up and listen people.... LMAO