Forum / Serializing my new book on Fictionaut

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    Benjamin Matvey
    Jan 28, 06:13pm

    After a lot of thought I decided, rather than go with a small press or to self-publish, that I would publish my novel, X, as a weekly serial on Fictionaut.

    I explained some of my reasons here: http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/benjamin-matvey/x-the-authors-introduction

    As promised, I even published a foreword by author and creative writing prof Ken Bingham:
    http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/benjamin-matvey/x-foreword-by-ken-bingham

    And here is my first chapter (originally published as a prologue a few months back): http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/benjamin-matvey/x-chapter-1-alex

    And I will publishing chapter 2 tomorrow and each addition chapter for the next 18 Sundays.

    I hope you'll check it out let me know how to make it better if I do decide to do a rewrite. You can follow it by joining this group: http://www.fictionaut.com/groups/x-a-novel

    Much thanks to Fictionaut for allowing me to try this experiment!

    Ben

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    Robert Lamb
    Jan 28, 07:09pm

    If I recall, there's a limit to how many words you can post at one time on Fictionaut. I tried posting a very long short story once and had to give up. How will you handle the limitation? (This assumes the limit hasn't been extended.)

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    Meg Pokrass
    Jan 28, 07:19pm

    so exciting!

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    Benjamin Matvey
    Jan 28, 08:13pm

    Thanks Bob. Huh. I didn't realize there was a limitation to how long stories could be. The total novel 73,000 words but it is broken into 19 chapters, which vary greatly in length, with short inter chapters in between. I was going to publish them one at a time and I guess if one is two long I will break it into chapter X part 1 and Chapter X part 2. But, Meg, do you know the word limit for posts?

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    Dolemite
    Jan 28, 10:17pm

    I've seen stories 10,000 words long.

    Keep in mind a normal "Return" generates a double space on Fnaut, and a "*" (if you use that to designate section break) also generates a double space.

    Both of the above can add to the visual sense that a piece is longer than it actually is.

    (Use "Shift/Enter" for single space between paragraphs.)

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    H-M Brown
    Jan 29, 07:08am

    Bob Lamb there is no limit on how many words can be posted at one time. My longest Chapter in one of my Novels here clock in at 8300 words and nothing bad happened to it.

    What I think you're probably thinking of is the limitations of how many posts can be made in a row to prevent people from posting five stories in succession thereby knocking out other people's works from the front page of this site.

    Benjamin Matvey, welcome to the extremely small group of Fictionaut's Serial Novelists. I can assure you it will be worth the fun. My advice is to let your readers know that there is a PDF option where there are page breaks to make it easy for them to read. The fonts are big though but it's better then a endless wall of text.

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    Benjamin Matvey
    Jan 29, 02:55pm

    Thank you Matt! I did not know. And thank you H-M. That is very helpful. I will work on PDFing my chapters. Any suggestions on where best, besides in my "X, A Novel" group should I place all the chapters? I have a facebook page, but am wondering if there is another site where I can place all of the chapters in one place for easy reading.

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    Benjamin Matvey
    Jan 29, 06:01pm

    Any other folks who have tips for spreading the word about the novel, please let me know.

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    Jürgen Fauth
    Jan 29, 06:28pm

    There's (virtually) no word limit for stories. That has always been policy; however, there was a technical limitation at one point that cut them off after a certain length. We fixed that, so now you can go nuts.

    Looking forward to the serialization, Ben!

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    Benjamin Matvey
    Jan 29, 06:39pm

    Thanks Jurgen. And I just posted Chapter 2:
    http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/benjamin-matvey/x-chapter-2-min

    The nice about the format, which works perfectly with serialization is that the people who have read the novel tend to choose one of the 3 POVs that are used as their favorite and are most interested following their journey. Here you can do that just be tuning in every 4th week, if you like.

    I have a favorite character as well, but I'm, certainly not going to share that until the whole thing is published!

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    Susan Tepper
    Jan 29, 11:03pm

    Ben there is a lot here that I enjoyed very much. I think you have a great eye and ear for character and setting.

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    Benjamin Matvey
    Jan 30, 03:04am

    Thank you Susan. I hope you'll keep reading. The mood progresses gently, but the POVs switch a lot and I curious to see how that works for people!

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