As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been serializing my novel Soap and Water here on Red Lemonade rather than publishing it all at once. I could put it up all at once, it is all finished, but there are several important reasons why I think that’s the wrong way to approach publishing on the Web.

As part of my day job I edit a blog about marketing, and over the past three or four years I’ve watched the buzzword of “content marketing” become nearly universal among online marketing types. For those of you lucky enough to be innocent of that kind of language, “content marketing” is basically when companies try to get your attention by offering useful information, or at least some kind of entertainment, rather than sticking an ad into something else you’re reading or watching. It’s become ever more important on the Web, where users demonstrated years ago that they have no patience for pop-up ads and ignore banners. (There’s a million examples out there, but here’s one off the top of my head: http://www.gereports.com/.)

The idea is that it’s better to attract a group of people who like what you do and nurture a conversation with them than it is to make a fleeting impression on a bunch of people who don’t care about you.

So I have this thing I want to promote—a novel—and it’s full of content. Instead of simply offering it in one big lump, therefore, I decided to dribble it out.

The other major thing I had in mind was that people simply don’t read anything long on the internet. Everything I’ve seen about internet use patterns says that you’re doing amazingly well if you can get someone to stick with you for a full minute. It didn’t seem realistic to me that anyone would read 400-plus manuscript pages on a computer screen. Indeed, it might be pushing it to think they’ll sit still to read a whole chapter.

Some guidelines I’ve tried to stick to: 

1) I keep it as short as possible, preferably under 2,000 words per installment. Ideally it’d be a lot less than that, maybe as little as 500 words, but given the chapters I’ve already written I think chunks that small wouldn’t make enough sense.

2) I try to keep to a regular schedule, posting new chapters every Sunday and Wednesday.

3) I publicize each new chapter everywhere I can, on Twitter (@joshuamalbin), on Facebook (www.facebook.com/joshua.malbin), via email (http://eepurl.com/f-9tH to sign up), and on my own blog (www.joshuamalbin.com).

And I keep trying to adapt. Once I realized how easy it was, for example, I started making every chapter available on my own website in various e-reader formats (www.joshuamalbin.com/soap-and-water). Lately I’ve started to notice a kind of burnout happening among my readers, and have started to wonder if perhaps I’m not following well enough the lesson of email marketing that if you pester your audience too much, they’ll stop responding. I’m going to test out a less frequent publishing schedule and see how that goes.

I’m hardly the first guy to figure any of this stuff out. Comic book authors like Warren Ellis (with FreakAngels, http://www.freakangels.com/) and Carla Speed McNeil (with Finder, http://www.lightspeedpress.com/) have been doing it for years: publishing stories online serially and then selling collected versions as books. I expect we’ll start seeing it more and more in fiction, too. (Though only as these authors have done it, as promotion for a book they ultimately plan to sell. A user poll over at Smashwords (http://blog.smashwords.com/2010/06/are-serialized-ebooks-bad-idea.html) suggests pretty strongly that users won’t pay for a book in installments. Once they pay, they want the whole thing. )

What do you guys think? Does the return of a super-cheap mass distribution technology mean a return to the days of Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote their books for dirt-cheap newspapers? Or will serialization become a meaningless idea once everybody has a tablet for their e-books?