Question How do you like it?

There's a couple ways to look at this. First is that from a reader perspective, how much is a lot of reading? The answer varies depending on where you look... but the 'average' American reader reads around 10 novels per year (as opposed to the average American who reads fewer than 5). Someone who reads 10 novels per year is reading between 800k and a million words per year... It would take that person between 10-15 years to work their way through just the existing canon collection (during which time more material would be included), assuming their only source of material was the Whateley canon universe. If they ONLY read new releases, a regular 20k word weekly cycle of releases will actually slowly pull ahead of this average reader... with 52 weeks at 20k coming in a little over a million words.

A fairly voracious reader, someone reading a novel per week, isn't going to find 'all' their reading material filled by our ongoing output, as a 20k release once per week is only 20-25% of a novel. During our more aggressive release schedule at 3 items per week, we were hitting 50-75k words per week... which isn't quite a novel per week, but its between 2-3 per month. And at the 50 books per year pace, it would take someone dedicated to reading through the canon collection close to 2.5 years. Trying to catch up on the collection while reading everything new during a 3/wk schedule? Would take around 7 years.

So... understand that we aren't talking about average readers when we get into a conversation like this. Average readers... people who read fewer than 10 novels in a year... aren't even keeping up with a 20k word per release by reading everything we post. They're reading 1 in 3 of those, only the First Gen or only the Second Gen... or only stories about specific characters. We're talking about the hardcore reader who makes even the aggressive, voracious reader look like a slowpoke. And like designing video game end content around how fast the hardcore progression guilds can defeat it... it's close to impossible to build a model that is 100% successful based on that extreme demand.


From a site admin perspective, I can tell you that the site is far healthier (visitor wise) when we are consistent. Erratic releases result (and you can compare this with the strength of support and popularity of hundreds of web comics and fiction sites) in poor visitation. It doesn't matter how much people love a story/comic, but if you are erratic in your releases, visitors will simply put you on a once per month use and visit just long enough to see what you did that month and then move on to their other content providers. This mentality actually gets worse as people get used to 'binge watching' ...

I can tell you from practical observation of statistics that this site received FAR more visits when we were releasing regular on Monday/Friday than is accounted for by having people come two days instead of one (ie the increase was more than double). In theory, the more frequent visits result in more communication between readers because of the likelihood of people being present to converse, instead of making a post that might get responded to by the next time you are on. Feedback amounts increase as a result of a more active community.

A good example would be the difference between activity and community here vs Bigcloset. If you look at it, on the surface, BCTS gets 5-7 new content posts each day. And members make blog posts and discuss things in feedback. But in actually amount of content posted? Most of the BCTS daily content is 1k word segments of stories... not even enough to count as chapters. It takes 20 of them to match the average 20k word WU weekly release. So when we were pushing two or three releases per week, we were actually matching them for content output. The difference being, we were doing it on two days. Not spread out over the week (and that's without including the WhatIF content, which is not insignificant).

So, really, more releases is a benefit when it comes to growing and sustaining an active health community. Giving people a reason to drop by the site and see what's new... on the forums, in discussions and feedback... by itself is helpful, but new content is still a big factor. Having larger less frequent or unscheduled content releases... will be harder to keep a community together for. And if you want feedback? You have to have a community that is comfortable giving it.

As far as ideal length of each piece.... common wisdom is about 3k words for a chapter. But for episodic, its less specific. Still, I didn't some research with web serial stuff online and found that releases range from 15-30k, most at 15k or 20k. This is a long enough amount to feel like you can get in, get some character development or plot advancement, large enough to avoid reading like a chapter (with its limitations of one setting or perspective) while also being short enough to not begin to feel like each part is a novella and should be 'finished' start to end. Also, for pricing, this size makes some sense - an $8-9 book split four to six ways is a $1.50 to $2 serial price.


Also, one additional question to answer as it came up along the way... we try to keep a few stories in the pipeline because its easier on the editorial and publishing end not to have to go "Ok, its Sunday, we need a story for tomorrow's release" and to have someone that's 'mostly' ready at us to clean up and get ready to go out the door. We've done that. It's mostly gone unnoticed, so we got away with it.. but none of US felt like it was the right thing to do... we take pride in producing the quality of stories that we do. The last thing we want to do is be in a situation where we're pushing drafts out the door because they're the only thing available to go to keep up with a schedule that is releasing too much too quickly. On the other hand, we WANT the stories to keep moving and to get feedback on the things that are done. That's why we have implemented a 2 per week or even 3 per week release schedule at times.

When we have enough in the pipeline to do that, what we're saying is "IF we continue releasing 1 per week, we will have more than 10-12 items in the pipeline, enough for three months". At that point, we start to add a second release on say alternating weeks. if we get to the point where the scheduled pipeline has 20-24 stories in it (enough for three months at 2 per week), we add the third release. And the reverse is true as the pipeline diminishes. If we get down to twelve pieces left, we're not going to keep releases three per week... we'll diminish our output and ensure that we can still release something each week for a couple months while new material is being worked on. That's necessary because the time it takes to finish stories is flexible... we had a huge backlog of things when E.E. was unwell and Elrod got attacked by a rabid hurricane. Since then, we've had to drop down to a slower release cycle... but we sustained a regular output of stories despite nothing new getting written for a month or more there...

And keep in mind that its uncommon that an author comes to the table with multiple parts of a story already done. They've got part one ready for some reviews... part two is partly written, and part three to whatever are still just notes and outline. so its not an option to run five parts of said story back to back for convenience in reading. It's also going to cause problems if we have three authors come to the table with multiple part stories and we want to run all of author A's parts before getting to author B's story. If we did that back in Diane's day, we'd have had a 20 part ayla story controlling the release cycle until we finally got around to letting something else out. Mainly, cycling through lets everyone get some feedback (which, like coffee and scotch, keeps the words flowing)... and its important when you remember that not every reader is reading every story.

At the same time, we try not to have too much time between parts of a story... but let's face it, most of us aren't writing a novel a month... so a three or four part story isn't going to come together in a month so you can read it as it comes together. We only stay ahead of voracious readers because there's a group of us. Even then, the fastest readers are always going to consume content faster than we can produce it. The size or timing of the releases isn't ultimately going to change that directly. Indirectly though? Having a bigger, more active community is the best way to result in more WhatIF and, as an outcome, more canon authors. And more people writing quality stories could, in theory, outpace even the fastest readers. Especially if we ended up with some big money backers and could lure the authors to spend more time writing and less on silly things like working for a living.

Rose Bunny wrote: MY Ideal, I think would be Monday being a Gen 1 story every week, Gen 2 every Friday, with occasional misc. stories on Wednesday, thinkgs like Non-Whateley, or Gen 0... but I know that's not really practical or realistic.

Ya.. we've discussed doing something like this, but it all goes out the window when we've got 8 things in the queue and they're all gen 1. or they're all gen 2, etc. Could we do a Monday Gen 1, Weds Gen 2, Fri Library release and never stray from that, even if it means that if there is nothing of that type available that that day goes without? Yes... technically we could. But that might also result in having three months of stories in the pipeline getting no feedback while two potential release days go empty.

It typically takes 8-12 active writers to sustain a 20k word per week release cycle (where each author releases, on average, a new segment each 3 months (a novel per year). A fast writer like Elrod, Morpheus or Diane will do several times more... and E.E. has done 2-3 times normal also, when he's feeling well and he's getting good feedback and morale support.

elrodw wrote:

Astrodragon wrote: One thing to point out.
If you want us to write more, and more frequently, comment more.
Authors are greedy for comments and feedback, the more we get the more we write
(we grind it up and let our muses mainline it...)

Normally, yes. But with the ongoing, agonizing flood rebuilding, my muse is too busy sitting in the corner sucking her thumb and whimpering (when she's not sneezing and coughing from allergies from the unfinished inside of the house).

But yeah, muses eat comments like candy.

Sounds like we need to get you and your muse over to a spa in New Mexico for a de-tox cleanse.