One of the things I am working into my Master Plan for next year is they idea of selling one-time ‘tickets’ to serial stories. The stories would be free to read for a period of time and then fall into a pay-to-read status. (More info on this in the Selling Serial Stories post on Everyday Dragons.)

But in order to sell content, I need to have content. The horror!

I also need to have content that works well with a serialized blog post, and that’s a bit more complicated than I had expected.

I’m still hashing out the formatting, the flow, the delivery methods… and I’m not finding a lot of other online novels that really match the feel I have in my head of what I want.

So I’m running a ‘test’ story starting this week and we’ll tweak it as she goes.

The story is called ‘The Wolves We Are‘ which isn’t the best title in the world, but it works for now. I’m expecting it to run for eight weeks, give or take, with an initial guesstimate of a thousand words per post.

This story isn’t just a test of the formatting, it’s also a test of my own time management skills. Even though the story has been completely outlined and divided into rough scenes, everything will be written in the week before the post.

Because of this, the story will be a ‘polished rough draft,’ and I reserve the right to edit it as I go. I’m still trying to hash out at what point natural breaks in the story are likely to come… thus far my Muses seem to like 500-700 word chunks, but I think that’s a bit too slow if it’s a once a week posting.

Future serial stories will be pre-written, with a lead-time based on how long it takes me to write these posts. I may just give up the ghost and declare that the stories must be finished before I start posting them, but I’d rather train myself to a set publishing schedule.

I’m logging the hours I spend working on the posts and will be asking for feedback on quality so I can tweak the numbers. For longer stories I’m thinking I’ll need at least a 12-week lead time, but we’ll see.

It’s like NaNo, only slower! (grin)