A Guide to Web3 Storytelling #1
How Novelists Can Grow Their Readers’ Community One Story at a Time
Publishing a book can be a long and expensive process. You start with a manuscript, or sometimes even several manuscripts. You hire some publishing services to proofread and polish your work, illustrators to make your characters come alive, graphic designers for the cover and interior design of the book, etc. And you might not even know your readers nor know how to start growing your community of readers.
Why not try a new approach to storytelling and build suspense with a series of stories instead of one novel? Imagine if novelists could get readers to fall in love with stories one at a time, building up a larger audience as they go along. Imagine crafting your novel as you gradually release stories or chapters and getting immediate feedback from your community of readers.
While heavy readers and people who love to read epic stories might disagree with this, there have been a lot of talks lately about the increasing popularity of short content. The success of movie series, webcomics, and the rise of digital publishing platforms such as Medium and Substack demonstrate the growing popularity of “snackable content” content.
What if novelists could grab the attention of readers with one story at a time?
Short, fragmented, or serialized content provides an opportunity to build your audience, expand your reach and engage with readers. For the writer, it is also a great format to try out new ideas, or test new categories and topics.
Let’s take a look at how Readl can help authors launch- and RE-launch — their books.
Serialized novels
Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, serialized novels became very popular: they allowed authors to reach lower-income readers, while publishers benefited from recurring revenue.
If you’re working on a novel, or you’re about to start, you might want to consider serializing it.
Here’s why:
- Serialized fiction keeps the audience coming back for more. Each installment usually has a compelling cliffhanger, which makes readers anxious to read the next chapter.
- It gives writers more opportunities to brainstorm and come up with new ways to progress their narrative.
- A serial format might be the best way to gain an audience since you have time to build a platform and let your work circulate.
- Serializing your content can help you raise money to fund the whole book.
💡PRO TIP : What if the readers who collect all the chapters could win a special prize? With Readl you can include useful information for your collectors such as utilities of your NFT story.
Spin-offs, backstories, alternative endings
Orson Scott Card’s parallel novel Ender’s Shadow is a compelling story that shows how the plot of Ender’s Game could have unfolded if it had been told from Bean’s perspective.
Charles Dickens’s novel Great Expectations was published in serial form. His friends persuaded him that the final chapter was not the ending his readers were expecting, so he published a version with a happy ending.
The popularity of sequels, retellings, and spin-offs of beloved stories has been going strong for years and shows no signs of slowing down.
Here’s why:
- Background stories of main characters can be a way to introduce readers to the original book.
- A spin-off can increase the readers’ engagement and reinvigorate an appreciation for the works from which it originated.
- If the books have an established fan base already, readers are more likely to pick up new additions in a series.
💡PRO TIP : What if you invited your community to contribute to your work? Readl makes it easy to distribute royalties with as many contributors as you choose.
Collectible content: unpublished material, “behind the scene”, special editions
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the publication of Shadow and Bone, author Leigh Bardugo delighted her fans by posting the first chapter of the book online with annotations. She shares insights into key moments in the chapter and how they would go on to shape the series as she continued it.
Special editions, storyboards, annotated drafts, etc, have been big collectors’ items, and web3 being a collector has never been so easy.
If you have already a loyal fanbase, you might want to consider releasing some premium content for your fans to collect.
And here’s why:
- It helps create a deeper connection with your audience
- Giving fans access to special content will make them feel rewarded and more engaged.
💡PRO TIP : To make your content more valuable and exclusive, publish it in limited quantities and for a limited time. With Readl , you can set a limit on how many copies are available for purchase, and for how long the listing will be active.
Conclusion
Short stories are becoming more and more popular in today’s world of content overload. They’re easier to write, their length makes them easy to read on mobile devices, and they’re also much easier to publish — although they still require good writing and a strong voice. If you’re not sure that you have the skills to write a full-length novel, why not start with something shorter? Short stories aren’t as intimidating to read or write, which may give you the confidence boost you need to try longer forms in the future.
A series of micro-stories is the narrative format of the future, and Readl is the platform that is enabling web3 novelists to publish a series of bite-sized installments without having to invest in all the infrastructure needed to publish a book.
About Readl
Readl is the first web3 platform designed to help storytellers, publishers, production houses, and NFT projects that want to publish, manage and distribute multimedia literary content on the blockchain, without requiring specific technical knowledge.
Our platform allows storytellers to create a decentralized library of literary NFTs, keeping perpetual royalties, where audiences can discover and consume content they love from any device and with web2 user-friendly onboarding.
