Diane Duane, author of the wildly successful Young Wizards fantasy novels, has decided to complete her "Feline Wizards" trilogy as a web-based, reader-supported serial. She'll publish the ten chapters or "The Big Meow" one chapter at a time, releasing a new chapter every time her donations pot crosses her minimum-to-publish threshold. At the end of the experiment, the supporters will get bound copies of the book from lulu.com. Diane's vowed to finish the book in time for the World Science Fiction Convention in LA this August 23.
The first two volumes of the Feline Wizards trilogy drew a sizable audience, but not enough to convince Diane's publisher to pay her to write book three. Over the years, an anxious audience has demanded a conclusion to the series, so back in December, Diane posted an open question to her blog: would her readers support her if she finished the trilogy without a publisher?
The answer's been a resounding yes — one reader's even gone so far as to offer a $1,000 matching grant to Diane toward the completion of the book.
I'll be blogging this experiment as it unfolds — check back here for notice when the first chapter goes live.
A lot of the people who mailed me knew about, and mentioned, Lawrence Watt-Evans' celebrated approach to his own version of this problem, in which he "serially" self-published his Ethshar novel The Spriggan Mirror, posting a chapter every time the PayPal donations from interested readers reached a certain point. (And afterwards, his book found a publisher, too.)
That particular business model had been on my mind for a good while. Certainly it has an honorable and ancient cultural precedent in the storyteller who unrolls his or her mat in the marketplace and tells just enough story to get your interest…then shakes the bowl in front of him/her, and waits for enough coins to jingle in it to warrant a continuation. But at the end of the day, when you start a project like this, the question is always going to be: is there going to be enough interest to see it finished? Yes, I want to tell this story — there are characters in The Big Meow who I've been wanting to write for a long time. And at the same time, what goes on in my household is still a business, about which I have to be fairly hardheaded if it's not to flounder in the face of present market conditions
(Thanks, Diane!)
