What is the difference between a "Novel Chapter" and a "Serial Chapter"?
Novel vs. Serial
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Comments
The author's choice
We don't have rules for that difference. Authors get to choose how to describe their offerings.
Myself, I figure a novel has a planned ending somewhere around 50 to 200,000 words. A serial is open-ended, to me.
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
How it's posted
It's been a long time since I've produced anything in the Novel length. Most of my work comes out in novella range somewhere around 20 to 30K words. I generally break it into chapters of 1000 to 1500 words. I personally won't post an unfinished work; I also tend to post it all at once.
Some people object to large (I'm guessing more than 10 minutes reading) posts so some authors cater to that and even though the work is complete post it a chapter at a time. For me that turns a novel, or novella into a serial. If a story is posted in parts then serial; if it's post all at once, novel.
However, some serials are open ended, e.g. "Easy as Falling off a Bike" by Angharad which at 3000 plus chapters and counting.
I have yet to do it, but since I was involved in the "One Dozen Roses" anthology and formatted the work I had to learn how to do an interactive table of contents, so to alleviate long post (requiring a commitment of a large block of time to read) problem, my work, going forward, will have an interactive TOC so reader can read a chapter or two, close the file and go back to it later and jump to the next chapter they want to read without wading trough the previous chapters.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
My personal opinion is that a
My personal opinion is that a novel will have one big story arc be that ties the story together. Serials on the other hand are tied together by other factors. It could be the main characters, like in Flash Gordon or the Lone Ranger, the setting, like a soap opera, Days of Our Lives, which is about the happenings in the town of Salem.
Another difference is that to get an entire story you need to read the entire novel as in a serial you can get an entire story by just reading the chapter of one of the storylines. A novel is closed-ended and a serial is open-ended.
To state it again that is my personal opinion and is just how I see it. Novels and serials are man-made concepts so by nature they are subjective, not objective.
Bike is probably a bit different to most serials
I used to post a short chapter pretty well every day, which is enormously time-consuming, but I had encouragement from a group of loyal readers to continue doing so. I did this for nearly ten years, which is thousands of hours and found that I simply didn't have time to continue in that vein. I had a break for a couple of years and have restarted it as a weekly offering, though even that can be a demand on time I don't really have, being remarkably busy in my retirement, or am I just slowing up in my energy levels. However, I'll keep trying to write Bike until no one wants to read it anymore plus the other stuff I scribble when I have time.
Perhaps the difference for many writers is the time factor, serials can be written with a scheme in mind but can be posted as they're written whereas a novel is usually written before it's posted (but not always). I'm reposting Snafu, which is a novel but I'm posting it in chapters, when I have time. So it may appear to be a serial but it isn't. It is a finished work and I'm re-editing it for BC as I go, but the plot won't change, just the number of typos.
Angharad
Trying not to miss.
Your story provided me a great deal of advice in trying times.
Gwen
Novel and Serial
I always assumed a novel is set story from beginning to end. Basically, the story has a central plot that starts and you find out what the end results is at the end of the story.
As for serial, I believe that is basically a series of stories told of how your character develops. How the main character of the story develops through out their interactions of events. Like some of my favorite urban fantasy stories Alpha and Omega, The Dresden Files, Sookie Stackhouse stories, Mercy stories, and the Anita Blake series.
If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
― Toni Morrison
Posting Novels
At some point I read advice (either on here or another forum) that novels were indeed too long for most readers to deal with in a single posting. So instead mine are broken into 6 'parts', each part usually 4-6 chapters of varying length and coming out to 18-22k words - though cheating with mega parts of 30k+ has happened -cough-. While the 'parts' are blocks of the story, i.e. not entirely arbitrary choices as to where to divide the novel into the 6 pieces, they're still part of one whole story - the ending is at the end of the book.
In a way trying to structure things like this has helped in the developments of the books as it enforced a story map structure as well as a balance between action scenes and development scenes. Each part has some action (hopefully keeping the reader engaged and wanting to turn that page!), and the scope of that action can be targeted for the usual 'big action in the middle' followed by 'bigger finish' at the end. Though that's more specific to the more fantasy/sci-fi adventure genres.
Unlike a serial where things can be posted as they're written, even this format of a novel if not requires then heavily suggests finishing the whole thing before posting any of the parts, as once the book is drafted going back through from the beginning with the editing phase can improve so much now that the whole is 'known'.
The other benefit of not posting all 100k+ words of a book all at once is longer reader exposure time on the home page list as each part comes out. :)
I've not tried to post each chapter individually (30+ chapters per book) mainly because chapter length can really vary, so posting a 6-8k chapter and following up with a 1-2k one feels like it'd be cheating the reader somehow, especially those that really want to immerse themselves for an hour or more in the story. Maybe that's just me, though.
-Erisian
shake a stick, see what you've started!
Just to complicate things further, a novel can be part of a series but it doesn't work the other way around! I think if you get to book 4 with the same characters etc you move into series land - there will be a theme running through but each volume should fairly well stand up on its own too. I don't think anyone specifically sets out to write a series in this context, they just happen and take on a life of their own. Readers lurve such series, they know the characters, the setting, its like catching up with friends each time. Single volumes are much harder to 'sell' to your audience as they have to learn a whole new phalanx of characters etc.
But why do we break novels up into chapters anyhow? Well have you tried reading a book that isn't - i find it quite difficult, like many readers i like to read in bitesize chunks and dividing a book into chapters allows me to do that knowing that a break will happen and i won't have to re read a page or two to get back into the flow. Some writers just don't get that and it makes for heavy reading. Gaby for example, is a series of 26 novels that follow the life of our heroine, each one split into 40 chapters of generally similar length.
Now we've established the why we go to how long. This is something which varies considerably and whilst if i'm sat indoors with a book i might read 10k words happily, i would suggest however that many readers prefer something shorter - indeed, talking to a number of people, 2k is about right for online reading which is how a lot of people do it these days. Particularly in any alt. genre, many readers don't want family, friends, workmates to know what they are reading, 2k is a ten minute read tops, 4k might be pushing the reading window and 10k or more - well i struggle without any constraints so someone sneaking a read will most likely pass up altogether.
Some serials can make the move to novel, others not, simply because they have no clearly defined start/finish points. Yes you can dip in at any point but storylines are often short or impossibly long and often entwined such that they appear, vanish and resurface apparently willy nilly, they just don't make the transition very well.
To sum up, a series, whilst it may end, is open ended, a novel/novella has a conclusion although this may run through more than one volume.
Madeline Anafrid Bell