Conviction, my little Star Wars novella, wrapped up its serialization run yesterday. It’s been an interesting experiment, though it mostly went like I thought it would. I was frequently late updating links to chapters, though never by more than a day. Until yesterday no one was reading it anyway, so I doubt anyone noticed. I did find myself reading each chapter as I added navigation links, and true to the legacy of George Lucas I made a few edits along the way.
To clarify, it’s not entirely true that no one has read the story. I did zippity doo dah to publicize it, but Chandra posted a link to the story yesterday on Facebook & Twitter, which generated enough traffic to make my WordPress app notify me in great excitement. A handful of people got as far as the first couple chapters before bailing, and as of today a grand total of one person has gotten through the whole thing, so to whoever you are…
Maybe next time around I’ll announce chapters as they come out like a person who actually wants his work seen. Not on Facebook, though. Facebook can suck it.
On a purely technical note, WordPress turns out to be an okay way to serialize fiction, but it’s not designed for it and there’s more manual attention required than what I would prefer. The initial posts all had to be done manually, and as I mentioned above I had to go back to each one again to add links as chapters came online. Hardly back-breaking work, but it’s a hassle.
Anyway, on to the next thing…