Serial Fiction

WRITING X 413.17E

Learn to keep readers passionate about and engaged with your story as you develop a series concept and outline for a seralized work — a story your readers will enjoy one episode at a time.

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What you can learn.

Learn about the re-emerging art of serialized fiction, updated for a digital publishing and reading landscape
Differentiate between traditional novels and stories and works meant to be serialized over time
Develop an original premise, including a series premise, synopsis, and season outline to help guide your writing
Workshop with peers to improve worldbuilding, character, pacing, point of view, and other craft elements

About this course:

Whether published on a private platform or one of many emerging reading apps, serialized fiction is not only a method to keep engaged readers returning to an author’s content, but is also a fantastic way for authors to publish profitably with a low-cost barrier to entry. In this course, we study serialized fiction, an episodic or bit-by-bit method of storytelling that has been popular for nearly 200 years. You explore both the market opportunities for publishing serialized fiction as well as the craft of developing and executing a series. You explore the critical differences between the structure of novels and a series, develop an original series premise, draft a synopsis/blurb for the series, outline one season/arc of your series, and study how to structure character beats and arcs. You workshop with peers to analyze worldbuilding, pacing, word count constraints, and POVs, and develop a plan to market the series to encourage high reader engagement. This course includes video lectures, reading assignments, and writing exercises. Authors produce a series synopsis, brand, and at least three episodes to support a pitch to digital publishers (one of the various reading apps) or self-published on one of the royalties-paying platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle Vella. Please note: this is not a course to learn to write a book series.