[Molly Barton] In which we discuss the HBO for fiction

Bleeding Ink

Did you know that the modern-day commuter makes more death-avoiding decisions on their way to work than an age-old agrarian farmer made in an entire year? Sound stressful? It is. No wonder we seek hits of serotonin and dopamine from entertainment.

Sugary Delights

A firehose of sugar water is pointed at you. Look around. Count the number of distractions vying for your attention. Social media? Work? Email? News? Video games? The next bestseller? The latest viral video? Blog posts? Shopping? A glass of wine? Ahem—this podcast? The list grows in inverse proportion to our societal demands. Go to work—go to happy hour. Help the kids with homework—binge-watch hours of Netflix. Do something difficult—do something enjoyable.

Where attention equates to dollars there is an attention economy, a marketplace that fosters an influx of candied products to delight, to offer a respite over challenge, to numb rather than invigorate. It leads to “peak content,” where products are engineered to strip away pain—much like heroin.

The problem for writers is that a bundle of words are a more challenging prospect than say, a bundle of chocolate-dipped churros—I mean Instagram pics. Churros are easy and delicious. As writers, our competition is a basket of churros. I mean c’mon, it’s just unfair.

Serials

This is where Molly Barton comes in. She’s thought a lot about how to alleviate—God forbid—the challenges of reading while keeping its integrity intact. How can she sugar-coat narrative so that it becomes a slightly sweet snack that doesn’t expand the waistline. Her answer: serials. Her company: Serial Box.

Serial Box aims to be the “HBO for fiction.” Through her experience as Global Digital Director of Penguin Random House, she recognized a shift: the shape of story consumption is evolving. People want more in less time. Serial Box produces seasons of short narrative episodes (ebook and audio) just like television, and television is the king of time to entertainment ratio.

The power of serials lie in their ability to give readers a way to manage their time. They slice a narrative into savory mouth-wads, like a chewy, crunchy, salty-sweet bite-sized Snickers, and are tuned to the high-frequency attention band consumers operate on today. They dismiss that guilt-ridden bedside reading queue and lower the barrier to entering a fictional world, because, hey, they only take about 40 minutes to read—about the length of one episode of Silicon Valley or, for the audio version, an episode of Game of Thrones.

Consider Writing Serials

Serial Box has four series running at the time of this writing, with a fifth on the way and a few in the burner, and whose genres range from procedurals to SFF, and soon, historical drama. All are written by writing teams—a unique approach and, yes, it is similar to television production. Teamwork spreads the demands on their authors’ time. Out of the twelve or so episodes in a season, each writer is responsible for two, and at 12,000 words an episode, it is only a novella’s commitment. Oh, and this is discussed in the podcast, team writing can be ridiculously enjoyable.

Serialization gives authors other advantages such as rapid reader feedback that allows for course correction and better stories, and shorter stories mean higher completion rates, especially as the series progresses—40% of readers actually finish your novel, yikes. You can aggregate serials into larger works as well, which lead to even more engagement (and sales). There’s a lot of upside.

Of course, there’s downside too. Serials are not seen as literary and struggle to compete with epic works whose slower pace offer discerning readers a deeper involvement in the narrative. I like to think that as more writers hop on the serial bandwagon new narrative mechanics will arise to address these drawbacks.

Exciting stuff. Molly and I discuss all the above and more in this episode. Enjoy.

Learn

• How Serial Box has become the “HBO for fiction.”
• Molly’s role at Penguin Worldwide where she combined literature and technology to increase reading engagement
• How e-books fail to capture what’s interesting about digital delivery
• Why long-form reading struggles against peak content—and how movies do as well
• How writers and readers benefit from serialized fiction
• About the first interactive book experiences, such as Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth mobile app
• Why Alan Lane founded Penguin, how he elevated paperback publishing and created the first book vending machines.
• How Serial Box takes the idea of “writing rooms” and applies it to written media
• The magic number for a serial’s word count
• How working in writing teams can be fun and solve difficult problems quickly
• Why you should consider releasing your book in audiobook as well
• The power of rapid reader feedback and how your serial will place you closer to your audience
• How analyzing television pilots can help you build better serials

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