As someone who has done web serials before (and is going to kick off a new one in the near future), you'd be surprised about that point about publishers and chances -- often, providing the readership online hasn't been too pronounced, the agents and such simply won't care providing it's not online by the time they're getting ready to sell it (especially if you're going to make edits to it.) I enjoyed The Red, The Brown, The Green and it's actually what got me thinking about serializing a good-but-"unsellable" manuscript myself!
I used to have a Wordpress for what was, essentially, a first draft but it's now defunct as I've been shopping the (heavily edited, third drafted) manuscript around for almost a year. I relied on TopWebFiction and WebFictionGuide for a lot of my discoverability, but both those sites are basically dead these days. The biggest problem with putting your stuff online is getting eyes on it.
The biggest site for serial fiction is probably Royal Road -- however, the general audience for serial fiction trends quite young, especially on Royal Road, and is predominantly organized around the isekai and LitRPG genres. If you're not posting something that fits that place and audience, you'll get buried and won't pick up readers. But Royal Road is generally reputable and won't, say, claim ownership over your work when you upload it (unlike some of the other bigger sites for web fiction.)
It really depends on what your goal is, or goals are. I'm going to try Substack and see how it goes, mainly to try and build a little following before exploring self-publishing. Royal Road is where I'd nominally suggest, if only because it has activity and users and a small but growing community of writers who aren't doing the standard RR fare -- but, even so, you're not that likely to pick up too many readers. Speaking personally, I serialize things because I like putting things online for free and don't particularly care about monetizing my hobbies. What draws you to serial fiction and the serial process?
Does anyone know how Kindle Vella is doing? (Serialized fiction for $) I've heard very little about it since the launch, so I'm curious if anyone has found success there.
I'm not surprised. It's hard to imagine paying for a book that I have to stop and start all the time, when the market is saturated with cheap ebooks that are complete.
I'm not *too* familiar with Vella, but what I've heard is consistent with what radicaledward said. As far as I'm aware, it's never really taken off and Amazon doesn't seem to know what to do with it. Vella always struck me as an odd idea, personally. Think of it this way -- if someone is going to hop on Amazon to read something, Vella's pay-per-chapter model needs to be a better option than paying 4.99 for a full Kindle Unlimited novel or whatever. But why would it ever be?
Have you considered making it available as a print on demand book? A friend of mine runs a small alternate history publishing house that does this and it's relatively easy.
Came here to say this. These days you don’t need to “make copies” to publish a paperback. If you self-publish, you can upload ebooks and make paperbacks available through POD. The paperback profits will be lol but you won’t have upfront costs, and it will never go out of print.
POD requires a whole other level of work. The covers have to be different, with front and back matter, and have to exactly fit their template (which I found impossible to achieve with anything except Illustrator, which I didn't have). There's a spreadsheet calculation involved with choices about paper, color or not, etc. and pricing.
I did it for two books, and have one up as an e-book and waiting for me to do it, but I just can't get up the gumption. It doesn't seem to boost sales much in my fiction genre (fantasy), so there's no real incentive. OTOH, the non-fiction A&P workbook I only sell as a POD is doing pretty well, so that was worth the effort.
Yes, there's more labor and expense that goes into creating a POD product than a lot of people think.
I'm not very familiar with the fiction novel POD marketspace, but I know that in the tabletop RPG book market, the biggest POD vendors charge a whole lot up-front for putting a POD product on their service, so it's only an economical choice if you're very sure that you have a big enough customer base to recoup the cost of putting it out there. My favorite indie RPG, Red Markets, is impossible to find in print now, but not popular enough to justify a POD edition. It's a real bummer.
By the way, Freddie, you should read Red Markets. It's an overtly leftist post-apoc economic horror game. And the author, Caleb Stokes, is a (now-ex) high school teacher with strong opinions on public education. I occasionally wonder if you two might be long-lost twins or something. http://redmarketsrpg.com/
Congrats! I enjoyed the beginning, but I couldn't remember details over the breaks so I decided to just wait and read it all at once. I'm glad it's finished so I can read it now.
That was a great piece at Sublation, and a great argument for abortion rights.
One intractable issue we’ll always run into us those who take the “rights given by God” angle. I can’t agree with it, but I also must respect it and engage with it. The conservatives will almost always ping the left for abortion and the left will ping the right for the death penalty with regards to inconsistency.
I’ve solved that problem by having a personal ethic of life: I’m pro choice through 16 weeks (even though I don’t LOVE the idea of abortion personally) and I accept the death penalty in only the most unassailable cases of heinous crime, like a serial killer (even though I don’t personally support the death penalty). My position is that I can accept that sometimes it’s ok to end a human life (a fetus is human even if it’s not yet endowed with personhood) though the circumstances should be highly prescribed.
Of course whatever my personal ethic is has no bearing on the law. But it does give me a clear foundation that’s already based on compromise from which to argue. While I find your argument about ownership of the body extremely compelling, there will be some people who can never accept that a fetus is NOT a person.
The novel was a great read! As an SF reader, I was particularly impressed with the world-building aspects: the world was both plausible and one I've not seen before.
So without doing the "here's exactly what I meant" thing, I think I wanted people to think in terms of the old idea of using colors to denote different ideologies or factions - calling communists reds, calling environmentalists brown, etc. Which does not mean that the title colors are meant to refer to real-world politics, rather just the idea of competing factions with competing ideas, and also obviously the suggestion of a color palette.
I read your piece on abortion in the Sublation. A question that I ask in any abortion debate is at what point does an organism become an individual human member of society? In your terms, this would be the point at which it becomes the human body over which others should not have control. In all cases, this is an arbitrary line that could be anywhere from conception to birth. But those who want the unlimited right for a woman to abort need to accept that a two-week premature baby is somehow different from a 38-week fetus.
You bring up another arbitrary line, one that delineates child from adult. There are a number of these age-at-which-one-can-have consensual sex, vote, drive, join the military, drop out of school, etc. However, a 38-week-old fetus and a baby that is two weeks premature are both the same “age”: 38 weeks from conception. It is where they “live” that is the difference here: one in the womb and the other in the world. I would submit that both organisms are the same. The baby has not crossed some chronologic line.
In the example you give and in the other age-at-which examples, there are restrictions as to what one may do before reaching certain age. These are established to protect the immature person from bad decisions. But in none of the examples is it permissible to terminate the existence of the immature person. I would submit that that is a significant difference between the fetus and the baby and the child and adult example you provide.
That's fine. As I said at the outset, it is an arbitrary line. But, morally, then, one would need to look at a two-week premature infant (or even one at term, for that matter) and understand that five minutes ago, someone else had control over its body and now no one does. That is a moral position that, personally, I have difficulty accepting.
Yes, as I have said, it is an arbitrary line, even conception is. But, if bodily autonomy is a key right, when that occurs is critical. I have trouble saying that an otherwise identical organism is determined NOT to have bodily autonomy if it is inside a womb as opposed to being outside the womb. A newborn baby is essentially the same organism it was the moment before birth. If one's moral view is that a born baby has bodily autonomy and an equally developed fetus does not, one is saying not that a specific organism has bodily autonomy, but where that organism exists determines whether it is autonomous. That I struggle with.
From Freddie's abortion essay: "the blood of every Confederate soldier became the ink that spelled out a great American principle that held that, indeed, each and every one of us is sovereign over our own selves, our own bodies."
The issue with this argument is that it can be used to reach precisely the opposite conclusion on abortion. If a new human life begins at conception, then that person (the fetus) is sovereign, and cannot have life taken away at the behest of another person.
So the argument now hinges (as all arguments about abortion do) on precisely when a new sovereign life begins.
Abolitionists were regarded as sanctimonious religious busybodies by many slaveholders, IIRC, much as pro-lifers are sometimes regarded today. "If you're against slavery, don't buy a slave," basically. I'm pro-choice but I'm afraid that Civil War analogies on this subject will never be more than preaching to the choir, since there are ways to map both the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" positions onto the CW if you try hard enough. (Not that preaching to the choir doesn't have its place.)
I enjoyed the novel...a curious, mysterious, somewhat sad, unconventional pastiche of "Mad Max" and a bunch of other post-apoc settings. Plenty of plot hooks one could use for further writing or thought experiments. There was an annoying part of my brain that kept wanting to know "WHY?" in exacting detail, which I guess is a bad habit from mostly reading ratfic. But it's apropos, since technology has been lost and no one knows any of those answers anymore. A fine showing. Hope you write another one sometime, you've certainly got the chops for it.
And, yes, the illustrations were very on-point for the setting. Good pairing.
Congrats, Freddie! I haven’t had a chance to read the novel yet but I’m excited to.
Thanks for linking to your freelance page. I just finished your article on Hartford, man did you hit every point I was thinking of. It’s almost eerie how there are no people around in what ought to be a bustling downtown. Also some of the bleakest neighborhoods I’ve ever come across were in Hartford, the kind where every storefront has a cardboard sign and you wonder “am I still in the United States?” Sad.
When I was 18/19 years old, we used to go to some after hours clubs there and eat tons of ecstasy and dance. I think maybe once we didn’t get a car window smashed, lol. Good memories
Hey Freddie, thanks for the reminder and link to your professional webpage. Do you have a list somewhere of your podcast appearances? I enjoy hearing you at length and listen whenever you mention it in you’re newsletter. Am wondering if there’s a reference so I can see if I missed any.
One thing I’m curious about: since very few publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts, an agent is a virtual necessity. But what was your process for finding an agent? I’m finding it to be a slog.
As someone who has done web serials before (and is going to kick off a new one in the near future), you'd be surprised about that point about publishers and chances -- often, providing the readership online hasn't been too pronounced, the agents and such simply won't care providing it's not online by the time they're getting ready to sell it (especially if you're going to make edits to it.) I enjoyed The Red, The Brown, The Green and it's actually what got me thinking about serializing a good-but-"unsellable" manuscript myself!
Where do you serialize your novels? I've been considering such a thing but just not sure where the best place to do it is.
I used to have a Wordpress for what was, essentially, a first draft but it's now defunct as I've been shopping the (heavily edited, third drafted) manuscript around for almost a year. I relied on TopWebFiction and WebFictionGuide for a lot of my discoverability, but both those sites are basically dead these days. The biggest problem with putting your stuff online is getting eyes on it.
The biggest site for serial fiction is probably Royal Road -- however, the general audience for serial fiction trends quite young, especially on Royal Road, and is predominantly organized around the isekai and LitRPG genres. If you're not posting something that fits that place and audience, you'll get buried and won't pick up readers. But Royal Road is generally reputable and won't, say, claim ownership over your work when you upload it (unlike some of the other bigger sites for web fiction.)
It really depends on what your goal is, or goals are. I'm going to try Substack and see how it goes, mainly to try and build a little following before exploring self-publishing. Royal Road is where I'd nominally suggest, if only because it has activity and users and a small but growing community of writers who aren't doing the standard RR fare -- but, even so, you're not that likely to pick up too many readers. Speaking personally, I serialize things because I like putting things online for free and don't particularly care about monetizing my hobbies. What draws you to serial fiction and the serial process?
Very interesting! Thanks.
I've been thinking of using substack but discoverability is definitely a tough aspect.
Does anyone know how Kindle Vella is doing? (Serialized fiction for $) I've heard very little about it since the launch, so I'm curious if anyone has found success there.
Just the other day I checked out the subreddit for it. Seems mostly dead (the subreddit) which seems like a bad sign.
Some authors were complaining about earnings being way down and AI produced content filling the system.
Also ran across the greatest title ever on the front page: Sold as the Alpha King's Breeder.
I love it.
I'm not surprised. It's hard to imagine paying for a book that I have to stop and start all the time, when the market is saturated with cheap ebooks that are complete.
I'm not *too* familiar with Vella, but what I've heard is consistent with what radicaledward said. As far as I'm aware, it's never really taken off and Amazon doesn't seem to know what to do with it. Vella always struck me as an odd idea, personally. Think of it this way -- if someone is going to hop on Amazon to read something, Vella's pay-per-chapter model needs to be a better option than paying 4.99 for a full Kindle Unlimited novel or whatever. But why would it ever be?
Well bloody done! That is a huge achievement.
Have you considered making it available as a print on demand book? A friend of mine runs a small alternate history publishing house that does this and it's relatively easy.
Came here to say this. These days you don’t need to “make copies” to publish a paperback. If you self-publish, you can upload ebooks and make paperbacks available through POD. The paperback profits will be lol but you won’t have upfront costs, and it will never go out of print.
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834340
POD requires a whole other level of work. The covers have to be different, with front and back matter, and have to exactly fit their template (which I found impossible to achieve with anything except Illustrator, which I didn't have). There's a spreadsheet calculation involved with choices about paper, color or not, etc. and pricing.
I did it for two books, and have one up as an e-book and waiting for me to do it, but I just can't get up the gumption. It doesn't seem to boost sales much in my fiction genre (fantasy), so there's no real incentive. OTOH, the non-fiction A&P workbook I only sell as a POD is doing pretty well, so that was worth the effort.
Yes, there's more labor and expense that goes into creating a POD product than a lot of people think.
I'm not very familiar with the fiction novel POD marketspace, but I know that in the tabletop RPG book market, the biggest POD vendors charge a whole lot up-front for putting a POD product on their service, so it's only an economical choice if you're very sure that you have a big enough customer base to recoup the cost of putting it out there. My favorite indie RPG, Red Markets, is impossible to find in print now, but not popular enough to justify a POD edition. It's a real bummer.
By the way, Freddie, you should read Red Markets. It's an overtly leftist post-apoc economic horror game. And the author, Caleb Stokes, is a (now-ex) high school teacher with strong opinions on public education. I occasionally wonder if you two might be long-lost twins or something. http://redmarketsrpg.com/
Congrats!
I really enjoyed this and suspect the fun was partly in having to wait for the next episode. Very Dickensian!
Congrats! I enjoyed the beginning, but I couldn't remember details over the breaks so I decided to just wait and read it all at once. I'm glad it's finished so I can read it now.
That was a great piece at Sublation, and a great argument for abortion rights.
One intractable issue we’ll always run into us those who take the “rights given by God” angle. I can’t agree with it, but I also must respect it and engage with it. The conservatives will almost always ping the left for abortion and the left will ping the right for the death penalty with regards to inconsistency.
I’ve solved that problem by having a personal ethic of life: I’m pro choice through 16 weeks (even though I don’t LOVE the idea of abortion personally) and I accept the death penalty in only the most unassailable cases of heinous crime, like a serial killer (even though I don’t personally support the death penalty). My position is that I can accept that sometimes it’s ok to end a human life (a fetus is human even if it’s not yet endowed with personhood) though the circumstances should be highly prescribed.
Of course whatever my personal ethic is has no bearing on the law. But it does give me a clear foundation that’s already based on compromise from which to argue. While I find your argument about ownership of the body extremely compelling, there will be some people who can never accept that a fetus is NOT a person.
The novel was a great read! As an SF reader, I was particularly impressed with the world-building aspects: the world was both plausible and one I've not seen before.
I'm going to shill for Freddie and Vika and put up the tip-jar link: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/FredrikDeBoer "Tips will be split equally between the author and illustrator."
But one thing I was not able to figure out from the text was the meaning of the title. A search turned up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red–green–brown_alliance but I'm not sure if or how that relates.
So without doing the "here's exactly what I meant" thing, I think I wanted people to think in terms of the old idea of using colors to denote different ideologies or factions - calling communists reds, calling environmentalists brown, etc. Which does not mean that the title colors are meant to refer to real-world politics, rather just the idea of competing factions with competing ideas, and also obviously the suggestion of a color palette.
I read your piece on abortion in the Sublation. A question that I ask in any abortion debate is at what point does an organism become an individual human member of society? In your terms, this would be the point at which it becomes the human body over which others should not have control. In all cases, this is an arbitrary line that could be anywhere from conception to birth. But those who want the unlimited right for a woman to abort need to accept that a two-week premature baby is somehow different from a 38-week fetus.
They are different in the exact same sense that a child becomes an adult at the stroke of midnight on the 18th birthday.
The law always by necessity draws sharp distinctions along a natural continuum.
You bring up another arbitrary line, one that delineates child from adult. There are a number of these age-at-which-one-can-have consensual sex, vote, drive, join the military, drop out of school, etc. However, a 38-week-old fetus and a baby that is two weeks premature are both the same “age”: 38 weeks from conception. It is where they “live” that is the difference here: one in the womb and the other in the world. I would submit that both organisms are the same. The baby has not crossed some chronologic line.
In the example you give and in the other age-at-which examples, there are restrictions as to what one may do before reaching certain age. These are established to protect the immature person from bad decisions. But in none of the examples is it permissible to terminate the existence of the immature person. I would submit that that is a significant difference between the fetus and the baby and the child and adult example you provide.
"It is where they “live” that is the difference here: one in the womb and the other in the world."
Correct. And that is the distinction on which I would base the law.
That's fine. As I said at the outset, it is an arbitrary line. But, morally, then, one would need to look at a two-week premature infant (or even one at term, for that matter) and understand that five minutes ago, someone else had control over its body and now no one does. That is a moral position that, personally, I have difficulty accepting.
You either believe life begins at conception, or you endorse some other equally arbitrary standard.
Yes, as I have said, it is an arbitrary line, even conception is. But, if bodily autonomy is a key right, when that occurs is critical. I have trouble saying that an otherwise identical organism is determined NOT to have bodily autonomy if it is inside a womb as opposed to being outside the womb. A newborn baby is essentially the same organism it was the moment before birth. If one's moral view is that a born baby has bodily autonomy and an equally developed fetus does not, one is saying not that a specific organism has bodily autonomy, but where that organism exists determines whether it is autonomous. That I struggle with.
From Freddie's abortion essay: "the blood of every Confederate soldier became the ink that spelled out a great American principle that held that, indeed, each and every one of us is sovereign over our own selves, our own bodies."
The issue with this argument is that it can be used to reach precisely the opposite conclusion on abortion. If a new human life begins at conception, then that person (the fetus) is sovereign, and cannot have life taken away at the behest of another person.
So the argument now hinges (as all arguments about abortion do) on precisely when a new sovereign life begins.
EDIT: Ron Turley beat me to a similar comment.
Abolitionists were regarded as sanctimonious religious busybodies by many slaveholders, IIRC, much as pro-lifers are sometimes regarded today. "If you're against slavery, don't buy a slave," basically. I'm pro-choice but I'm afraid that Civil War analogies on this subject will never be more than preaching to the choir, since there are ways to map both the "pro-life" and "pro-choice" positions onto the CW if you try hard enough. (Not that preaching to the choir doesn't have its place.)
I enjoyed the novel...a curious, mysterious, somewhat sad, unconventional pastiche of "Mad Max" and a bunch of other post-apoc settings. Plenty of plot hooks one could use for further writing or thought experiments. There was an annoying part of my brain that kept wanting to know "WHY?" in exacting detail, which I guess is a bad habit from mostly reading ratfic. But it's apropos, since technology has been lost and no one knows any of those answers anymore. A fine showing. Hope you write another one sometime, you've certainly got the chops for it.
And, yes, the illustrations were very on-point for the setting. Good pairing.
Thanks so much!
Congrats, Freddie! I haven’t had a chance to read the novel yet but I’m excited to.
Thanks for linking to your freelance page. I just finished your article on Hartford, man did you hit every point I was thinking of. It’s almost eerie how there are no people around in what ought to be a bustling downtown. Also some of the bleakest neighborhoods I’ve ever come across were in Hartford, the kind where every storefront has a cardboard sign and you wonder “am I still in the United States?” Sad.
When I was 18/19 years old, we used to go to some after hours clubs there and eat tons of ecstasy and dance. I think maybe once we didn’t get a car window smashed, lol. Good memories
Hey Freddie, thanks for the reminder and link to your professional webpage. Do you have a list somewhere of your podcast appearances? I enjoy hearing you at length and listen whenever you mention it in you’re newsletter. Am wondering if there’s a reference so I can see if I missed any.
Congrats, this is quite wonderful.
One thing I’m curious about: since very few publishers accept unsolicited manuscripts, an agent is a virtual necessity. But what was your process for finding an agent? I’m finding it to be a slog.