It’s often lamented that the art of deferred gratification has vanished from our instantly downloadable culture, but the increasing popularity of serialised novels suggests this may not be the whole story.
This won’t come as news to anyone who spent the autumn of 2014 gripped by the unfolding drama of the Serial podcast, which took the No 1 spot on iTunes before it was even released, and 18 months later had racked up 80m downloads. Though non-fiction, Serial was cited as a gamechanger for the way we consume stories. But, as many pointed out, it was merely changing the game to a model that dominated publishing for the second half of the 19th century – and built the careers of Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Wilkie Collins and many others.
Serialisation – which took off in earnest with the publication of Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers in 1836 – allowed reading to become a communal and more easily accessible experience. Those who could not afford the publication, or couldn’t read for themselves, joined reading clubs and informal gatherings where the latest instalment was read aloud every week. It was only as book production became cheaper and literacy more widespread that the serial novel began to lose out to completed books, making reading a more interior and self-contained pursuit.
There have been honourable attempts to revive the format in recent years – Armistead Maupin’s early Tales of the City novels appeared first in the San Francisco Chronicle, and in 2006 the Observer published Ronan Bennett’s chess thriller Zugzwang as a weekly serial, but it has not been widely taken up by writers or publishers as the best way to reach an audience.
Now, belatedly, it seems that publishing is catching up with its appeal. Online publisher Serial Box, which allows readers to access novels in serial form in both text and audio format, last month secured £1.65m in initial investment. And there’s growing interest across the industry in the potential of serialisation to harness the demand for audiobooks in particular, and what is often called “snackable content”, as people’s reading habits change and stories are consumed on the move – while commuting, or during a run.
Of course, publishers have long relied on the attraction of recurring characters and long-form story arcs, but this has tended to take the form of series, with individual novels as episodes. The eagerness of readers for the next fix of a beloved character’s adventures was most obviously manifest in the near-hysteria that attended publication of a new Harry Potter novel, with children queuing for hours outside bookshops to get their hands on a copy the minute the doors opened at midnight.
The ubiquity of digital platforms has made it harder to prevent the leakage of new books and taken away the need to stand outside a bookshop in the rain – it’s difficult to imagine the communal excitement of Pottermania today. But that fundamental desire to find out “what happens next” is the motor that drives all storytelling, and the delicious agony of waiting to have our curiosity satisfied has fuelled the success of long-running series in print and on screen.
It’s odd, then, that there should be a kind of literary snobbery attached to the idea of a series. It’s a format we associate principally with genre fiction, particularly crime, fantasy, comics or children’s novels – books that are considered “entertainment” rather than literature, as if there is something inherently less serious about the pleasure of revisiting familiar characters, or less original on the author’s part in returning to the same milieu. But look more closely, and recurring characters and storylines appear in “literary” fiction too: Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, or Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, and what are Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels, if not a series?
“Binge-watch” was Collins Dictionary’s word of the year in 2015. The popularity of serialised long-form television drama was quickly superseded by networks making entire series available whenever we chose, eliminating that enforced waiting period and losing something of its pleasure in the process. Publishing already gives us the option to binge-read a story; it’s called a novel.
I love the idea that we may begin moving in the opposite direction – making stories more of a shared experience, to be discussed with friends while we collectively savour the anticipation of the next episode. Those of us who write fiction – whether in a series or not – could rise to the challenge of plotting in a different way, looking with fresh eyes at that million-dollar question of how to keep readers coming back. In an age when novelists are frequently told we have to adapt to new technologies or risk being left behind, it’s satisfying to find that the future of storytelling might mean a return to the techniques Dickens was perfecting nearly 200 years ago.