What Does Writing Episodically Even Mean?!

My mind is buzzing at the moment. I really enjoyed the Book Cover 101 series I wrote to kickstart this blog, and now I have a thousand more ideas I want to share with you.

In this post I am going to talk about the concept of writing episodically. That's a term that I have used a few times already, and today I'll explain what I actually mean by that.

I will offer some tips and advice about how to actually write episodically in a future post.

Episodic Reading Platforms

Platforms like Dreame are a relatively new concept, but I was immediately comfortable writing in this style because it's very reminiscent of the way a lot of people of my age (I was born in '91, I am peak millennial) first started to share our work. Back then it was on sites like fanfiction.org and Quizilla, which I mentioned and explained my own experience with in my first ever post. A TL;DR version is that on Quizilla authors would share new chapters of their stories by posting a 'quiz' which was 1000-3000 words long because of character limits.

In the past couple of years, a few bright sparks have realized that this pretty old/clumsy way of writing actually transfers really well to the world of micro-transactions and user-driven content. You post it as an actual chapter and it's presented as a book with a cover, a blurb, and appropriate tags to help people find it.

Authors post their work as 'episodes' on the apps rather than sharing an entire book in one chunk. This means that they can build up a following, and people can opt to add the book to their library and read and comment as it is published or wait until it has been marked as complete and read it all in one go. If the book is popular, it may be invited to the 'pay to read' program, at which point people will pay to unlock new chapters. They can use the free credits they earn each day, or purchase credits for around $1 for 100 credits. The price to unlock a chapter is based on word count, which means chapters under 3000 words long are more appealing - they cost about 10 cents each to unlock.

This is how Morrigan looks on my dashboard - it's not my most popular book but it is my favorite so I'm sharing it as my example anyway! You can see that Morrigan currently has 41 'episodes'. It's currently at 62593 words, so those episodes are all about 1500 words long.

At this point in the story, I am not even a quarter of the way into the plot. Fifteen chapters of this story have taken place on one night, and that's fine! People enjoy it, they read it; they comment on it and tell me they are loving it.

Centuries, my main series, is now approaching 750,000 words. I'm not bored of writing it, and my readers are still enjoying reading it. That's why this is an ideal platform for my style of writing.

If I had sent the manuscript for the first book in the Centuries series to a traditional publishing house, they wouldn't even have bothered to read the first page. They would never have given a 'first timer' a chance with a 200000+ word novel.

"750,000 words?! That's insane..."

Kind of, I guess. It depends on how you write and what your readers enjoy. Some people don't like to drag their plot out, and that's obviously totally acceptable. If you want to publish a 20000-word novella on an app as 20 episodes, you can publish one! Loads of readers enjoy those, especially because they aren't paying to unlock 400 chapters that way.

Other people really love long books that they can lose themselves in, or which follow a format a bit closer to a soap opera. My favorite books are the Earth's Children series; if you know what they are, you will 100% understand how I started to write epically detailed 750,000 books with copious smutty scenes.

If you've never heard of the series, it's a set of 6 books that total more than 1.5 million words. They're notorious for an insane amount of detail and accurate descriptions of life (and smut) in the Paleolithic. The author is incredibly passionate about making sure everything she describes is plausible, and she based the cultures she describes in the book on real archaeological sites, many of which she visited and sometimes helped with. She's the reason my degree is in archaeology, and I am just going to go ahead and link to her Wiki page at this point because she's way too interesting for me to do any justice to in this post.

When you consider that her work is what I find the most inspiring, it isn't that strange that I am 3/4 of a million words deep into this crazy story about werewolves. It's also not that crazy to believe people enjoy reading things of that magnitude, because over 45 million copies of her series have been sold worldwide.

There are loads of authors who don't write such long books, and lots of people have their own rules about how long they like their stories to be. Some of them won't publish anything longer than 100,000 words, others won't go over 100 chapters. But for people like me, who do write really long books, it's a particularly forgiving method of publishing.

"I'm still not convinced."

You're not alone.

Sharing your work like this hasn't been taken very seriously as a publishing method until recently because user-driven content often means you have to sift through a lot of pieces written by people who are extremely passionate but in need of help with grammar and spelling (and plot, and editing, and character development, and world-building, and...)

They also feature a lot of x-rated content; exactly the same as every other user-driven writing platform always has done, let's be honest. This means people tend to think of them as being solely for poorly written smut.

I don't think that every book ever published on an episodic app is a work of pure genius, but they are garnering more attention, so there are an increasing number of talented authors on these platforms and they are filled with hidden gems.

Many of these authors have eventually had their work published by traditional publishing houses when they have been able to approach them with evidence they have a solid readership base, and the platforms themselves are starting to publish some of their bestsellers as physical books, adapt them to audiobooks, and even have them turned into television shows and movies.

This uptick in popularity, and quality, means that people are now paying attention to the work and authors who are emerging on these apps. At the time of writing this blog post, Amazon is in the early stages of creating its own episodic reading app, an offshoot of kindle called Kindle Vella. I could write an entire post about my apprehension regarding that, but for now, I'll just say 'hooray, people might take my work more seriously' rather than being negative and harping on about the compensation they are offering their authors and how it compares to other apps...

"So, who is actually reading your behemoth of an erotic novel?"

Dreame currently has over 5 MILLION active users, and the amazing thing is that they are able to comment on the chapters as I write, and offer feedback.

Some comments can be all that keeps you going on a bad day - recently someone commented on one of my chapters after I mentioned an obscure band because she was super excited that someone else knew of and enjoyed their music. That made me so astronomically happy that I am still happy I made that offhand reference. Other comments are less encouraging. I have been extremely lucky in that the comments I have received have been overwhelmingly positive, but every now and again someone will get upset and leave a hurtful comment.

The way I deal with those is to ask myself a question:

Would this comment sound insane if they said it aloud in a book shop?

Here are two comments (they aren't real, they're just examples for the sake of this post)

1. It's such BS that I have to pay for this, it used to be free and I was really enjoying it.

2. Your grammar is terrible. When you say things like 'their was no milk in annies fridge" it makes it difficult to read, and I am upset that I paid for this chapter when you haven't bothered to proofread it. I feel like you don't respect me as a paying customer.

Every single negative comment I have ever had has been in the first category. If someone read the blurb on the back of my book, then got angry at the clerk in the bookstore when they had to pay for the book, they would look insane. If they paid for my book, then found that it was filled with errors, they would be right to complain.

Other than basking in praise, or seething because someone was snarky, the fact you can interact with your readers is really valuable. Some authors have found that a side character becomes an unexpected hit with their readership base, and they have been able to launch spin-offs with an immediate following because people were begging them to write more about that character. Others are happy to ask what their readers want to see, which they can do because they can post 'author's notes' which appear at the end of their chapters.

We're encouraged to use them to help build a rapport with our readers, and they are really valuable. I did this one chapter in Centuries Book III that made me cry my eyes out - it's a flashback, and it revealed a lot about the character I was writing about. At the end of the chapter, I asked if people enjoyed it and if they would want more of that type of thing in the future. The fact I could take a risk on writing that chapter and get feedback from my readers (who loved it) has allowed me to develop as a writer and explore my characters and their backstories in a lot more detail. It meant I was confident when I had this idea for another flashback to the first chapter of the first book told from a different perspective - a chapter which people absolutely loved, and which I wouldn't have taken a risk on if they hadn't let me know they liked the first flashback. When my main characters were going through one of the more serious plotlines in book II it was entirely inappropriate to write anything sexual, so I asked if people would find it really weird if I was to write that kind of scene with different characters (side characters who had become really popular, which I knew thanks to the comments).

Other than asking for feedback, I've also been able to share in advance when I am going to be taking a day off. As a person who has epilepsy, I can say 'I had a seizure today, I am sorry if I missed a typo, I will check again tomorrow' and people will understand rather than leaving one of those complaints that are in the 'totally justified' category. This definitely ended up far longer than I expected, but I hope that I've been able to explain what I mean when I talk about writing episodically, and some of the things that make this a great platform to consider if you want to share your own work.