Charles Dickens did it. So did Mark Twain, with both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn!
Back in the Victorian era, many writers published their fiction chapter by chapter, in monthly or weekly magazines like "Household Words."
Readers LOVED the stories.
Readers flocked to buy the weeklies.
Dickens' good friend Wilkie Collins was so popular after he started writing The Woman in White -- an epistolary novel considered to be one of the first MYSTERY or detective novels -- that readers lined up to buy the next installment!
Among other writers who published in serialized format in the 19th century: George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith and Robert Louis Stevenson. Later, much of Joseph Conrad's fiction was first published in British and American periodicals (Both Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness was serialized in three parts in Blackwood's Magazine.
THE HUFF PO IS AT THE FOREFRONT OF THE PUBLISHING REVOLUTION!!
Just as the Huff Po is helping to revolutionize journalism by taking over the news and news feature delivery business, the blog has now decided to venture into the story publishing business!
We are in the throes of a publishing revolution. As book publishing is changing in monumental ways, it seems time, and timely, to try the serialization format again, only this time, the "household words" will be electronic!
Starting this week, my new novel, Seeing Red, will become the first novel ever to be serialized on the Huff Po.
Seeing Red is a love story, and it takes the reader on a wild adventure across the warm and sunny and very romantic region of southern Spain known as Andalucía (a wonderful time of year to get away to Spain :)!!
It's a love story just in time for Valentine's Day.
But it's much more than a love story. It's a story of discovery. It's a woman's journey to find herself as an artist, and her slow and often painful realization that even though she adores her guitarist lover Jesús, and even though she has chased him half-way across the globe (he has those eyes like melted chocolate!) in the end, she doesn't need him to be happy.
As I say in the promo for the book on the Seeing Red website, Ronda Cari spends half a lifetime searching for true love, and then she discovers it, in the magic of her own (flamenco) dancing!
The Huffington Post isn't alone dabbling in serialized fiction online. A group of science fiction writers are hard at work composing
billed as a "rip-roaring adventure tale set in 1241." According to its writers, Mongoliad.com is not only exciting reading, it's "also the beginning of an experiment in storytelling, technology, and community-driven creativity."
It's an experiment worth pursuing!
Books in print may disappear someday.
But stories never will. As I say in my other experimental online book, the "blogga saga" Sister Mysteries, stories are what make us human.
Storytelling is as old as human beings; stories are how we make sense of the world and its chaos.
So get ready for another experiment in storytelling and digital technology! We hope you'll be a regular reader -- if you want to sign up to receive notices of new chapters of Seeing Red, email My_Story_Lives@yahoo.com.
Follow Claudia Ricci on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RicciCJ
This post appeared first on The Huffington Post.
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