What is Serial Fiction?

Binge-watching for Stories

Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, we were used to having to be in front of our TVs in order to catch the adventures and antics of our favorite TV shows. If we missed an episode, it was gone and we didn’t know when or if we would have the opportunity to see it again. Now, it seems like everything is on demand and we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want. Binge-watching by going through huge chunks of whole TV seasons is still the norm. It is rare that people have to wait for anything.

The popularity of the episode format predates television. There are people alive today who can still remember their family gathered around the radio in order to catch their favorite episode of dramas, comedies and variety shows that aired on the radio. Some of these had hundreds of episodes (The Lone Ranger had more than 1500!). Fortunately, they are collected for us now and you can find them online if you want to binge listen to them in a way that your grandparents and great grandparents never could.

Before that there were serial episodes in print form. Charles Dickens first published his classic, Great Expectations, as a serial in his weekly publication, All the Year Around. In the early days of print, weekly and monthly publications like this often had a far greater readership and distribution model than a mere book might see and it allowed authors to reach a more diverse audience.

The internet helped revive the serial fiction market again and many sites have sprung up, often with a wide popularity as new stories are developed, frequently using popular characters in new and sometimes very inappropriate ways. While these sites are quite popular with a certain subset of the population, for the most part, they have yet to break into the mainstream. I’ve started publishing my own serial fiction on Amazon with their Vella platform, but not everyone uses Amazon and the platform is currently limited to US users only. Because of this, I will be bringing my stories here to Substack.

I currently have 2 stories on Kindle Vella, a post-apocalyptic survival story, After It’s Over and a fantasy adventure story, The Force of Magic. If you are an Amazon user, you’re welcome to catch my stories over there, but it doesn’t matter to me as long as you read them!