Lance Schaubert

In the latter part of 1837, Charles Dickens published the first portion of a book that he would finish piece-by-piece in a magazine. He was twenty-five the year he ended each successive part on a cliffhanger. His audience waited, often jittery through half-contained excitement for the next issue. Bit-by-bit he orchestrated a novel whose last words greeted public eyes in 1838. They later compiled the book into the single volume we know as Oliver Twist. Commoners could afford the weekly installments while the aristocracy enjoyed complete volumes.

Sixty-four years after Oliver, Georges Méliès complimented his career as an illusionist with Le Voyage Dans La Lune. The innovation of Trip to the Moon shattered the time-boundary of two-minute shorts with its then stunning fourteen-minute runtime and later inspired Selznick to sketch Hugo. Granted, moving pictures eventually added enough film to keep an audience seated for a couple of hours plus intermission but there was enough room on the screen for short films all the way through Chaplin’s era. People paid a cheap price for several shorter films and then talked about them over ice-cream at the nearest diner. With the rise of the television, however, short films tapered off. Rising ticket prices made it unfeasible to go to short films. The industry exiled small-budget directors to festivals and college film classes. Feature films made the money. Good news for the average joe, bad for the struggling screenwriter.

In the late fifties, the paperback revolution made it cheap and easy to buy a full novel. Why pay for shorts or serials when you can get the whole thing for a dollar? Book production skyrocketed, despite the hollow warning from Publisher’s Weekly. The serial novel fell into… well… novelty. No, more than a novelty. Serials became a thing for antique road shows and pawn stars to get their grubby paws on. Good for the common man, bad for the struggling author.

Much later, YouTube entered the scene and threatened the success of America’s Funniest Home Videos and Total Request Live with viral short-shorts and music videos. People earned revenue from such things, but so what? People have always made money from exceptions like game shows and state lotteries.

Meanwhile, a little Internet startup purchased the French e-book company Mobipocket and used the company to introduce an e-Reader named “the Kindle.” They started selling digital books in addition to their already robust print market. Authors began making money from self-published books, but so what? People have always made money as self-backed artists and off of their hobbies. They’re the exception to the rule.

The National Film Festival started seeing more and more of their shorts on YouTube. Some rumored Pit Bull and JLo to have cashed more money off the YouTube version of ­­­­­On the Floor than the actual revenue from the song. At 500 Million hits, who could argue with that? Content creation now lives or dies inside the precious first ninety seconds and if your movie clocks in under fifteen minutes, you can even post it for free. Even Le Voyage Dans La Lune makes that cut, long as it was for its time. Keep an eye out for a coming surge in short film production because it’s once more financially feasible.

At the same time, Amazon released Kindle shorts – novellas, short stories and episodes for cheap. I’m noticing more episodes in the Kindle shorts market and wonder if we’re moving toward a culture of short films and serial novels, a deep culture that spends less time soaking up absurd amounts of information and more time processing the little information we do gather. People seem to discuss more, reflect more than twenty years ago. This got me thinking…

If  every agent in my genre(s) rejected my novel, I’d take a page out of Charley’s book at this point. The potential of serials finally persuaded me toward self-publishing. Either that, or I got tired of fighting the onslaught of “come on, everyone’s doing it.” I like to think I chose this path because of the former.

For you regulars, here’s what it might look like:

• Episode One:              FREE
• Episode Two:              $0.99
• Episode Three:           $1.19
• Episode Four:             $1.39
• Episode Five:              $1.59
• Episode Six:                $1.79
• Episode Seven:           $0.99

That way if someone wants to bail at any point, they can save their money. It’s free to catch the first glimpse of the world, but it builds value over time. I think Gergia’s worth more than a buck, but I don’t want to break any of you in the long run, so I’d drop the price back down for the ending. You’re faced with an option that way – keep up to date and discuss what’s going on the day it comes out, or wait a year for it. If you keep up week-by-week, the book would be $7.94 but if you wait a year, I’d bundle the book for the discounted price of $6.99 – sound fair? Again, I wouldn’t resort to this game plan unless I had no other option. After seeing some serial-esque publishing out there, I wanted to design a model for self-publishing authors to use.

Here’s the truth of the matter: libraries are expanding their print acquisitions, kids are reading more, and the world is growing more and more literate. On the other hand, the e-book market strutted forward. I neither believe that traditional publishing will die or that e-books will never earn critical acclaim. Instead, after noticing the traction short films keep grabbing, I approach this with temperance. Books will ear two kinds of acclaim: grossly popular and compressed critical. Because of this, one medium will continue to lead easily to the other. Charles Dickens and Georges Méliès may teach us yet again about how to sell entertainment as struggling artists without oppressing the public.