As I'm designing a site to make it look like I know what I'm doing (other that discovering the "publish" button in PubIt), I keep running into one problem. What do you call a book that isn't a book? The best analog I can think of for the kind of fiction I'm writing is comic books. That wouldn't be right, though, because these have no art besides the cover.
"Read my serial fiction" sounds horrible. Books? Misleading. Works? Too ambiguous. Stories... are for campfires and children. Issues? For my psychiatrist. Short stories also aren't right - these 1) aren't self contained, 2) aren't that short; 25K is higher than the submission cap I see on most short fiction sites.
What would you call each member of a collection of short stories, all of which are tied together sequentially by plot, character, and scene, but each of which is a contained "episode."
I intend for them to be very much like TV MiniSeries. Without TV. Or actors. Or special effects. So, just the series part.
* I do call each individual item "Series Title, Issue #N : Title of issue N. I'm not worried about what to put on the covers; I'm worried about how to write about them in my blog. "Hey everybody, come check out my... issues?" I need to fill in that last blank better.
Thoughts?
You could also use some archaic or less-used name for it. Jim Butcher has a series called "The Codex Alera". Codex, Archive, Collection, Compilation, Histories, Chronicles, Tales, etc. All could be used in a title to give the right impression and add some spunk to the name. I have a fanfiction series of shorts called "Tales from Konoha."
[This message has been edited by Natej11 (edited June 08, 2011).]
You could also speak of it as a "serialized novel" which people sort of know what that means. Their expectation would be that the pieces tie together eventually and would/could be bound in one volume (electronically or physically, doesn't matter.)
I'm going to stick with calling them issues on the cover, but I wouldn't invite readers to check out my issues. I think that's the blank I'm really trying to fill: "My friend Mike is a writer. Take a look at one of his ____."
I feel like episodes doesn't fit well at the end of that sentence; it sounds like it would work better if the person was addressing a doctor: "My friend Mike is having a seizure. Take a look at one of his episodes."
If I were telling you about Uncanny X-Men, I'd say you should pick up an issue or two. Check out this comic I found by the same guy who did Spider Man...
So far, Book feels the most right, but as someone who recently spent three years writing a 250K book, it feels almost cheap to call City of Magi (book) and Shelter From the Storm (Issue 1 of Those Who Die Young) by the same name.
)Then each one could be Chronicle or Tale # . . .
[This message has been edited by Meredith (edited June 08, 2011).]
Serial tales perhaps?
Instead of comics how about taking something from TV? Serial cliffhangers or whatever those old TV shows were called. Serial Adventures?
@asprit Downloads will technically be correct (I'm only selling them online), but it doesn't pass the sentence test: Take a look at some of the ____ I wrote.
@Meredith & Natej11 - Chronicles might work. I'll have to think about it.
@LDWriter2 - It doesn't have to be one word at all. Serial Tales... I'm trying to get away from the word "serial," however accurate it might be, because it sounds (IMO) too much like a scientific classification of an object, as opposed to a thing you want to go out and buy.
@genevive42 - Episodic novella series... accurate, kind of fun to say, but a little bit too much of a mouthful for my taste.
Incidentally, these are all good ideas. I'm just trying to come up with something that seems to stick. I don't see a lot of this stuff around (and perhaps it will fail miserably because of it), so I don't have a lot of established precedent to go off of.
quote:
In an homage to counting in order, I'd like to present the fifth installment of my freshest serial, The Seventh Rule...
If it's serial fiction, I don't see anything detrimental about saying so!
BTW if you haven't read http://cheeseburgerbrown.com/Darth_Vader/ -- it's without a doubt the best fanfic I've ever seen.
quote:
Take a look at some of the ____ I wrote.
Just curious, but if it's a serial, would anyone really want to take a look at numbers 3 and 7 of n, for example? Or would they have to start with the first issue or installment or episode to enjoy and/or understand them fully?
I know you've said that stories are for campfires and children, but I'm partial to that name if they really are individual stories that could be enjoyed out of order. Installments or episodes implies to me, at least, that each ____ is not fully standalone, and thus I'd have to read them in order to get the most out of them.
Is it the word count that is an issue? Certainly others are calling 40k stories books when selling electronically. Can you bundle two 25k _____s together into a 50k word 'book' (if it's the length that is a concern)?
I suppose it works, and perhaps i was too dismissive of stories. Perhaps my real drawback is that I feel a story is self-contained, and I consider the episodic-novella-chapter-installments to be halfway between contained and self-contained. They are SC in the sense that each one of them has (I hope... I've written a grand total of three) a beginning, middle, end, some sort of conclusion, and a reason to read on, but the are not SC in that issue 2 doesn't explain everything that happened in issue 1, is a direct continuance of the story, and assumes you know at least a little of what happened in the past (recently, at least, and there is a brief summary of relevant characters). That makes just gluing two of them together somewhat problematic. If I did glue them together, though, it might make it more sensible for me to sell at the magic $2.99 price point (instead of 0.99), at which you get 65% of the sale on Amazon instead of 30% (or 80-40 for nook, I think).
You could call them campfire tales. campfire adventures. or serials for the cereal crowd.
But if you don't like serial you could look up the synonyms of the word and see if you like another one better.
"Hey everyone check out the new episode of my Chronicles of Hype serial."
Perhaps you should make up a new word if the ones available are failing you.