: Re: Maintaining readers over time with serialized fiction? I am one of several authors on a fairly new shared blog. The blog has a mix of serialized and one-shot posts. Because it's a new blog

@Martha805

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I am not so much a reader of serial text publication, but I have some view which might be useful from comics. For comics, it is quite typical to have serialized publications. Consider the following examples:

American superheroes comics are published one adventure at the time.
Mangas are published weekly: a chapter each time.
Webcomics are published more or less regularly.

I haven't read much superheroes comics, but mangas, they have a rather fixed narrative structure. Each chapter is thought as a story on its own: presentation, tension building, climax and relief. All of it is contained in the chapter (sometimes not much more than a few pages). This is to get the interest of the casual reader, which can step in any time. They often end on the climax, to keep people interested to follow.

Some webcomics don't have aany long-term evolution (Dilbert, etc.), so they can't compare, but some do. And those face the same problem as you have: keep the readers interested to follow their publications and also bring readers in at any time. Indeed, most people don't start a comics from the start, but from the most recent publication. If they like it, they might go back to the start. If they don't, they won't bother. Two techniques are used to achieve that:

Regular publication. Most set some publications days, and with that fixed schedule they keep their readers and/or increase their numbers. From the notes published, I gather that when they have no regular schedule, or that they break it too often, they lose "followers" (for want of a better word).
Self-sufficient. Each and every publication can be read on its own. Humouristic publications try to add in a joke at each page (see for instance, the Order of the Stick).

You can, and probably should, consider both options together. But think about it with the following points

If you don't have an established base of readers, you need to make sure that anyone can jump in, with just the current chapter. And get interested.
If you don't have some kind of climax each time, people get frustrated.
If you don't have a regular (frequent) publication schedule, people have to check daily to see whether you published something.

The combination of 1. and 2. means that you'll loose readers.

Generally, I would conclude saying that a serialized publication has to be thought as several episodes/chapters and not as a single piece of work. You can also get some ideas from TV-Shows. No great novel would have had the success it had if it had been published pieces at a time and less so with unregular schedule.

As a side note, you mention that you receive some positive feed back, you should evaluate the type of feedback you get. See, for example, that question. Maybe the feedback you get isn't so reliable, even if it is well meant.

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