I wrote an online serial for three years, and it ended in 2016 (for... various reasons) after three volumes. It was a run of the mill urban fantasy series called The Wake. Here's a few of the lessons that I learned from it:
1) Plan.
Seriously, you need to plan these things out before they get away from you -- and they probably will, considering the deadlines that you're trying to keep to. You don't have to have the whole thing planned out, but you do need a general guideline of how the story goes. I did not, and it started to show by halfway through the second volume.
2) Have a buffer.
Because life is going to get away from you and you should have at least a couple of weeks worth of updates ready to go. I also did not, and spent some -- okay, a lot of -- weeks scrambling to get something up. The writing suffered because of this.
3) If something big in your life happens and you think you should probably take a break, then take a break.
My dad died only a few weeks after I started the second volume. I tried to write my way through it, but it just didn't work. I wasn't in any state of mind to be working on it. In fact, I think both of the second and third volumes suffered because of it. Looking back, I should have stopped at the first volume for at least three months and then returned later when I had a clearer mind.
4) If you're going to have a self-hosted website, make sure your host is reasonably-priced.
Part of the reason why the site went down was because I just plain couldn't afford it anymore -- my hosting company was American, and those conversion rates were killer at the time.
5) You will probably have a small audience and that's fine.
Unless you're posting somewhere like Wattpad. Web serials are still kind of niche and there's not a huge number of people reading them (Wattpad and the handful of big serials are the exceptions, of course). I don't know how many readers I had at the time, but I'm pretty sure it was less than 50 regular readers. Also, thank you so much for sticking around for as long as you did, regular readers, you're awesome, and I probably should have mentioned it more while the serial was still running.
I do go back and forth on whether I regret taking the serial down (I do have it all saved on hard drives), since it was my main creative focus for more than four years (so many drafts over the years), if I think it was wasted effort or not. But for the most part, I think I'm ready instead to make something new.
1) Plan.
Seriously, you need to plan these things out before they get away from you -- and they probably will, considering the deadlines that you're trying to keep to. You don't have to have the whole thing planned out, but you do need a general guideline of how the story goes. I did not, and it started to show by halfway through the second volume.
2) Have a buffer.
Because life is going to get away from you and you should have at least a couple of weeks worth of updates ready to go. I also did not, and spent some -- okay, a lot of -- weeks scrambling to get something up. The writing suffered because of this.
3) If something big in your life happens and you think you should probably take a break, then take a break.
My dad died only a few weeks after I started the second volume. I tried to write my way through it, but it just didn't work. I wasn't in any state of mind to be working on it. In fact, I think both of the second and third volumes suffered because of it. Looking back, I should have stopped at the first volume for at least three months and then returned later when I had a clearer mind.
4) If you're going to have a self-hosted website, make sure your host is reasonably-priced.
Part of the reason why the site went down was because I just plain couldn't afford it anymore -- my hosting company was American, and those conversion rates were killer at the time.
5) You will probably have a small audience and that's fine.
Unless you're posting somewhere like Wattpad. Web serials are still kind of niche and there's not a huge number of people reading them (Wattpad and the handful of big serials are the exceptions, of course). I don't know how many readers I had at the time, but I'm pretty sure it was less than 50 regular readers. Also, thank you so much for sticking around for as long as you did, regular readers, you're awesome, and I probably should have mentioned it more while the serial was still running.
I do go back and forth on whether I regret taking the serial down (I do have it all saved on hard drives), since it was my main creative focus for more than four years (so many drafts over the years), if I think it was wasted effort or not. But for the most part, I think I'm ready instead to make something new.
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