Blog Your Novel

In the 19th Century Charles Dickens famously serialized novels including "The Pickwick Papers" and "Great Expectations" in monthly installments in newspapers and magazines. Today he'd undoubtedly be doing the same thing, but quite likely in blog form instead.

Blogging offers a cheap and easy way to serialize and publicize literary works online. Indeed, blogged literature has acquired its own web nickname - "blooks." Yes, blooks. Fun to say, isn't it?

So maybe you've got a novel you're working on, or one that's been sitting on the shelf or in your hard drive for a while. Maybe you're tired of making the rounds of potential publishers and literary agents and getting the same old brush-off, that politely worded rejection letter informing you your manuscript just isn't a good fit for their list at the moment. Until they change their tune you might as well upload the first few chapters to a blog, link it up in various blog directories, spend some time publicizing the RSS feed, and start reaching all those potential readers the publishers and agents apparently can't be bothered with.

With a blog, each chapter can fit neatly into its own post, and successive posts can be linked together so readers can find their way through the narrative as easily as turning a page. Readers can also offer their comments on each chapter, feedback that could prove valuable if you decide to revise your novel. You can even experiment with different ways of making all your hard work pay off. For instance:

Offer the complete manuscript as a PDF file available for purchase via PayPal. Readers who get caught up in the early "teaser" chapters of your serialized version may not feel like waiting around for you to blog the next ones. By making the complete text available, you're offering these impatient readers the instant gratification they demand. For a modest fee, of course.

How fancy you get with delivering the full digital manuscript is up to you: you could simply email it upon receiving payment, or if you're more tech-savvy, create a special download location on your blog that's only accessible to paying readers.

Alternatively, you can make your novel a subscription service, with just a few chapters available for free and the rest available to paying subscribers behind a log-in. Blogger, for example, allows you to make your blog available to only selected readers via its "Permissions" settings. Create one blog with your free, publicly available chapters, and then a second blog with your restricted, subscription-only chapters. When someone PayPals you a subscription fee, you can then grant them access to your private blog where they can read your novel in its entirety.

Or, after building up a substantial online audience for your blogged novel, or blook, you could then approach a publisher or agent with your traffic stats and ask if they'd like to represent a popular online literary property. By demonstrating your ability to attract a large readership, you can now make a much better case for the saleability of your manuscript.

These are just a few ideas to get you started...and if you're creative enough to write a novel, you're certainly creative enough to come up with even more ways to promote it online. Write on!

Key terms: novel, fiction, narrative, literary blog, litblog, literature weblog, blook, serialize, promotion, publicity, publication