In a conversation with other authors, and one mentioned that on re-read, her ongoing serial didn’t have enough fail in the try-fail cycles. “Everything’s going too well. The readers like it, but it doesn’t hold together when I aggregated everything done so far.”
Which led to this conjecture: “Serial readers get their tension from having to wait a (time period) before the next release. So even if everything is going well in the story, there’s still a lot of tension and catharsis inherent in the release cycle. This can mask lack of progress or lack of tension in the story itself.”
Having read a few serials after they were collated into book format, the conjecture seems to hold water. My biggest complaint with several of those was that “nothing happens” – that there was no sense of progression in the overall meandering plot as the characters checked in with these friends, checked in with those friends, encountered this problem, solved it, wash rise repeat… or trained and fought, trained and fought, now trained and fought these other people, now trained and fought those people, without winning (or losing) anything concrete. They felt like the great swampy middle of a book had expanded all out of proportion, with no ending in sight, nor any plan on how to get there.
But… I was missing out on the wait/reward cycle that in inherent in the original serial release.
On the other side of the coin, I’ve read a series before that had each book ending on a cliffhanger. I found that annoying, but the rest of the book was written well enough I just borrowed the next in series, and kept reading. (At least, until the author failed to stick the landing from a prior book’s cliffhanger in the follow-on book. At that point, I lost interest and dropped it.)
When talking to other readers, I found several hated the series in question. The oddly strong emotional reaction was because the author had been releasing the books on a 3-month schedule, and then missed. The cliffhanger hadn’t been resolved for over a year. Interestingly, the readers didn’t hate the book for the plot or characters: the visceral anger was focused solely on the betrayal of expectations of wait time to resolve the cliffhanger. Having come to the series several releases later, I missed that contentious point entirely, and carried on enjoying it for another two books before I got to the “are you phoning this in? Did not finish.”
Given I write at a slow pace, and scattershot, I can’t take deliberate advantage of release timing like faster writers, but I can, at least, make sure each book stands alone. That will keep readers from feeling betrayed or angry at a lack of resolution. For anyone who writes faster, do you take deliberate advantage of this? Are there any other sides to it you’ve run into (upside or downside, orthogonal or tangential?)
Mad Genius Club 
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