How I love the Snarkives. And it’s always nice when I see eye to eye with Miss Snark (which happens more often than I just let on). In one of the posts buried in the list of thousands, she applauds The Spriggan Mirror author Lawrence Watt-Evans for serializing his work on the web. This was thee years ago this guy did this. Now I will readily admit that I’m very new to the whole web serial thing and as far as I’m concerned, it sprung up out of nowhere about 5 months ago. Now I know that’s not the case but is it really this old? If anyone has been in the game longer than I have, let me know.

Now, I’m not familiar with Watt-Evans (if anyone else is, let me know) but according to his site, he has a bunch of books published with Tor Publishing plus contracts so it’s safe to say he’s not representative of the majority of web serialists out there. This guy is a professional, quite literally, and he decided that due to fan requests, he was going to continue writing a series for his fans online when it was dropped by the publisher. The catch? They had to donate in order to get the next chapter released, which they gladly did and it worked. They soaked up the book and it was eventually e-published. It appears that he started another one as well although the site itself seems rather out of date. However, at the end of it all, he barely broke even on costs and even he stated that he hardly made minimum wage. Yes, he was in it for the money first and foremost (at least that’s what I took away) and for the fans second but in the end he still serialized one of his novels on the web.

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