Would you pause a series?

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

I’m working on what has become a long series about a young American couple who bond as a pair but also explore and enjoy swinging and group sex. To my surprise, I’ve found that this has a story arc that starts ten years ago and would finish in the present, and also that it has made me turn out a lot of content (by my standards). There are now first drafts of five parts, each around 10k words, going from the start (when the couple’s dating became serious) to about three years later (when they decided to start a family).

The going has been pretty smooth thus far, with the man and woman learning about themselves, and their desires, and with the sex getting more adventurous. The next stage, however, will be more demanding, as I try to work out how they (especially she) will continue their sexual exploration through pregnancy, birth, and parenting. I’m a husband and father, with experience of watching what my wife went through and how it affected her sexuality, but that’s a small database. I’ll need much more information. The point is, I don’t expect to write Part 6 and beyond nearly as quickly as I’ve churned out Parts 1 through 5. As highly sexed as these characters are (so far), I don’t expect the woman ever to say things like “At six months pregnant, I still want to be triple penetrated,” or “Tip the babysitter a whole lot, I want to stay late at the orgy.”

The end of Part 5 is a thematic turning point, when she decides to go off birth control. There are no cheats or cliff-hangers. I would let readers know that it may be a while before they see Part 6. My questions for all of you (finally) are: Do you think it’s okay to pause a series? Have you ever done that, intentionally or not? If so, has there been reader backlash?

https://www.literotica.com/stories/memberpage.php?uid=5116173&page=submissions

 

[KeithD]

I pause a series in writing it. I don't pause a series in posting it to be read--because I don't post any part of it until I've finished writing and polishing it.

 

[oggbashan]

I have. Christmas Fairy was paused for 13 years because I had written myself into a corner.

 

[Vix_Giovanni]

That sounds like a really good story arc. I think that your ideas and reasoning for the story make a lot of sense, since you've already started writing and posting it.

 

[SamScribble]

I was recently moderating a discussion at a romance writers group on this very point. The consensus seemed to be that pausing inevitably costs readers. I'm not sure whether you consider this a backlash or not.

 

[jaF0]

You know you're not under any obligation to anyone here right? There is no required schedule to keep up with.

 

[ElectricBlue]

The end of Part 5 is a thematic turning point, when she decides to go off birth control. There are no cheats or cliff-hangers. I would let readers know that it may be a while before they see Part 6. My questions for all of you (finally) are: Do you think it’s okay to pause a series? Have you ever done that, intentionally or not? If so, has there been reader backlash?

I took a year without publishing content while I wrote my novel length retell of the Arthurian myth. The discipline was worth it, to get it out as a finished piece, and several years on I can't tell what that pause did to my reader base. But someone like Melissa published as she went and gained loyal followers - there's no right or wrong.

You will lose readers if you have a hiatus in a published series, though, without doubt. And five chapters in, they'll be loyal readers.

My advice, with the story arc you propose - get disciplined and write it first, don't put yourself under pressure, and put out little side projects from time to time.

 

[NotWise]

"A Valentine's Day Mess" has been on pause since August, 2017. It took more than two years before a reader commented on it being incomplete, but it was being down-voted about a year after publication, and probably because it was incomplete.

The last two parts of the series are almost done, so it won't be paused for a full four years. I expect there will be very few readers for the last two parts.

 

[HeyAll]

The obvious problem is that the bigger the gap, the bigger the drop in views because people will forget about it.

That's generally true unless it's a hugely popular story with a distinctive title that people will remember.

 

[SimonDoom]

Is it OK to pause a series? Of course it is. There are no hard and fast rules on that. I would agree with others that, all things being equal, it's better to publish the first chapter after the entire series is done. But sometimes all things aren't equal. People wait years and years for the next Game of Thrones novel. Should he have waited to finish before publishing the first book? Of course not. He might never have published at all, based on how things have gone lately.

Tefler's seemingly endless sci fi series is very popular and has a fairly stable and large readership despite his taking a month or whatever between chapters.

I wrote an 8 chapter series over about 9 months, with several months between chapter 5 and 6. I lost some readers through attrition and impatience, but the final chapter still did quite well.

If Ch. 5 does NOT end in a cliffhanger and gives the reader at least some sense of intermediate resolution, then it might be just fine to publish up to that point and resume the tale later when you are ready. If it ends on a cliffhanger then it will bother readers to have to wait. You might lose some.

 

[yowser]

All other matters being equal, waiting until you are completely done is probably best from a quality/artistic standpoint.

I don't know enough about your writing process, but for me one of the biggest reasons to delay posting is that I might want to revise/change one of the earlier chapters depending on how things went in the later ones. It sounds like there is still some uncertainty about the characters and how things would go, so my main question would be whether the whole business (characters and/or plot) would be best served by seeing how everything plays out.

But you're God, you get to design your own creation.`

 

[oggbashan]

Except for Christmas Fairy - I considered the classic cliffhanger escape of 'With one bound he was free' but I had put the characters in an impossible situation with no way out that I could see. It took 13 years of constant review before I finally was able to move on to the already scheduled ending.

Even so, the first two chapters we reasonably successful, but the final third part is more satisfying - for me.

 

[PoisonPen33]

I recently paused a series. It took me several months to write the latest chapter of "Midnight Movie Club" and I realized it would be a while before I went back to it. So I put in a kind of "mid-season finale" scene and moved on to other stories. I'll get back to eventually. If I do, great. If I don't...well, then I don't.

 

[jomar]

Ogg’s got me beat by a bunch!

I waited a year before writing chapter three of my White Trash series, picking it back up for an AH challenge contest. There’s was a big drop in views from chapter one to two, maybe because I submitted it a day after the first and it got overlooked, I dunno. But there was no meaningful difference in views from two through four.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

Thanks, all. Your input mainly reinforces what I already leaned towards (and have always done in the past), to finish the whole thing (at least in draft, with all events determined) before submitting any of it. (To Vix: Sorry if I didn’t make this clear, but I haven’t posted any of it yet.)

We’ll see how long my resolve holds up. If Part 6 stalls me for two or three months, I may start convincing myself that the end of Part 5 would wrap up ‘Volume 1.’ Has it become apparent that I really like what I have so far?

For me, the most important thing is getting and keeping readers, and giving them reason to believe that I’m not messing with them. Since I only have vague ideas on the rest of the story (they’ll have two kids, and events in the wider world will have effects on their careers, unless I decide that none of this works), it’s probably too big a gamble to post anything now.

So thanks again, and as the OP I am okay with this thread ending.

 

[AvroAnsonXIX]

Sure for the right price.

For a slightly more generous "contribution" I won't start writing it at all.

So thanks again, and as the OP I am okay with this thread ending.

Yeah ... Uh, that's not the way things work around here. You, the OP pull the control rods out of the reactor core. We, the loose atoms go bouncing around in every direction until we collide with one another and ka-boom. You can push the control rods back in. But the heat from the fission you created remains.

 

[Bramblethorn]

The end of Part 5 is a thematic turning point, when she decides to go off birth control. There are no cheats or cliff-hangers. I would let readers know that it may be a while before they see Part 6. My questions for all of you (finally) are: Do you think it’s okay to pause a series? Have you ever done that, intentionally or not? If so, has there been reader backlash?

Yep. The first five chapters of my 'Red Scarf' series were posted between December 2017 and February 2019. For various reasons, there was a year-long hiatus, and then I posted the remaining seven chapters between Feb 2020 and March 2021.

The readers were pretty nice about it, but that will probably depend very much on category and target audience.

Did it hurt the views? Depends how you look at it.

Stories will naturally lose readers as they go - even on a regular posting schedule, you can expect to lose maybe two-thirds of the people who opened Chapter 1 by the time you get a few more chapters in.

But also, the later stories will normally have fewer views simply because they haven't been out there as long. If you come back after a year's break, obviously the older chapters will have a year's worth of extra views on them.

So the interesting question there is whether a gap causes you to lose views beyond what you'd expect from the time gap.

One way to do that is to plot view counts vs. story age. Here's how they look for my series:

Observations:

- Chapters 1 and 2 were posted around the same time, and about two months later Chapter 3 went up - you can see the bump in views near the 55-day mark.
- Views fall off from Chapter 1, as expected. By the time Chapters 4-5 were 100 days old, they had about 1/3 as many views as Chapter 1 did at the same age.
- There's a bit of a drop between Chapters 5 and 6, but it's not huge - about 20% maybe?
- Chapters 7-8 fall off a little bit more, but after that it picks up again.
- Chapter 11 is doing almost as well as Chapter 4, and Chapter 12 is tracking almost as well as Chapter 2.

There are lots of complications there. Different chapters have different titles and different scores. Another author gave me a plug shortly after #12 came out, which probably helped the numbers there. Overall, my impression is that I lost a few readers with the gap, but not disastrously many.

The flip-side is that when I came back after a year, there probably would've been new readers who weren't around when I was posting the early chapters, and would've missed the story entirely if I'd managed to post it on the one-year timeline I originally intended.


every chapter gets a bump in views when the

 

[Zeb_Carter]

I have several that are currently in a paused state. I am slowly getting them finished, but I am having trouble, not with the story, but with sitting for long periods of time. So, they have paused, until my sciatica is resolved.

 

[8letters]

For me, the most important thing is getting and keeping readers, and giving them reason to believe that I’m not messing with them. Since I only have vague ideas on the rest of the story (they’ll have two kids, and events in the wider world will have effects on their careers, unless I decide that none of this works), it’s probably too big a gamble to post anything now.

My advice on how to get and keep readers - publish quality stories. I'm a low-volume writer. August, 2016 was my breakout month because the two stories I published that month both had 4.8+ ratings. I've published 10 stories in the 4 1/2 years since, three of which were short stories I published for grins because I knew they weren't going to do well. In that 4 1/2 years, I've steadily climbed the Most Favorited Authors list and I'm currently at #73. I've made that climb because the few stories I've published lots of people really like.

 

[SimonDoom]

Yep. The first five chapters of my 'Red Scarf' series were posted between December 2017 and February 2019. For various reasons, there was a year-long hiatus, and then I posted the remaining seven chapters between Feb 2020 and March 2020.

The readers were pretty nice about it, but that will probably depend very much on category and target audience.

Did it hurt the views? Depends how you look at it.

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Your observations are consistent with what I've generally observed.

My observation based on my series (not a large sample size, but I've looked at others' series as well) is that there is some attrition that occurs directly as a result of waiting too long to publish a subsequent chapter. But after a while, the significance of the gap fades, because readers down the road don't know, and don't care, that you took a long time to publish the subsequent chapter, and the number of readers that you lost by waiting too long is offset (to some degree -- I'm not sure how much) by the number of new readers.

Another thing that exaggerates the appearance of the loss of views is the bump that a later chapter will give to the new chapter. I'm curious how much of a bump to chapter 1 you got from the publication of the chapter after the year-long wait.

Your last chapter's performance is remarkably good relative to chapter 1, by the usual standards of attrition at this site.

I think you meant "March 2021" not "March 2020."

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

To Bramblethorn: Thanks for the rigorous analysis. The notion that a publishing gap could get the attention of more (later) readers is interesting, but by itself this doesn’t persuade me that knowingly leaving a gap would be a good idea.

To 8letters: I always hope to write quality stories, but I yam what I yam and that’s all that I yam.

To AvroAnsonXIX: What I wrote was, “I am okay with this thread ending.” I certainly didn’t demand that it end, and I don’t mind seeing more input. I considered it courteous to inform people that they need not feel obligated to respond. I try not to waste system resources.

 

[LexxRuthless]

I took a 2-year break from my ongoing series. It was probably a bad idea, because I lost that momentum I had built up. When I sat down to write two more chapters, I really had to force myself to do so. I had to spend three days re-reading the entire series from the beginning so that I could get "back into the groove" of that style of writing.

The positive was that I managed to correct some of the plot threads; if I had simply continued plowing along with the series as I had been, those could have become a more significant problem. The most recent chapters are longer than most of the others, but readers have complimented me on them.

Now they just want to know when the next one is coming.

 

[whowrotethisshit]

Yup. I've been writing The Little Thief series since 2019. In that time there's been a world-wide pandemic, I've moved across country to a new state, I've moved in with a partner for the first time in my life, I've got a new job and quit a new job.

I'm doing my best to finish it this year. I'm having pretty good writing days lately so, fingers crossed.

 

[SimonDoom]

I took a 2-year break from my ongoing series. It was probably a bad idea, because I lost that momentum I had built up. When I sat down to write two more chapters, I really had to force myself to do so. I had to spend three days re-reading the entire series from the beginning so that I could get "back into the groove" of that style of writing.

I totally agree with this. The biggest problem with waiting to finish a series isn't the impact on readers -- it's the impact on the author's ability to get back into the groove of the story. It's much, much easier to slip up and insert things in the story that don't fit with the older chapters. It's hard to get back into it, as well.

 

[Bramblethorn]

To Bramblethorn: Thanks for the rigorous analysis. The notion that a publishing gap could get the attention of more (later) readers is interesting, but by itself this doesn’t persuade me that knowingly leaving a gap would be a good idea.

Agreed. It doesn't make up for losing a year's worth of views, it's just that you're probably not going to be 'punished' for it beyond that year's worth.

I totally agree with this. The biggest problem with waiting to finish a series isn't the impact on readers -- it's the impact on the author's ability to get back into the groove of the story. It's much, much easier to slip up and insert things in the story that don't fit with the older chapters. It's hard to get back into it, as well.

Yep, and part of the reason why my hiatus ended up being a year was the difficulty of getting back into it.