Serial Releases

eBook, kindle specifically

I paid for serial books about writing craft and eventually found that it wasn't worth four bucks for each Kindle "chapter", so I stopped buying them. However, if your story is interesting, has a compelling climax per book, and a hook for the next book in the series, you could do very well.

To be fair, the "chapters" were more like "booklets" (e.g., a short book on characterization). But, yeah, it got to the point that it was obvious the author was churning out booklets for sales rather than being truly useful.

re Question 1:
Ya... 10 episodes at $0.50 then joined up into an $7.99 tome means reader would saved $2.99 to read it as it rolled out. I don't see any other non-spurious price point. One guy decided the complete story was worth the sum of the episodes times 1.5 and felt no issue with charging $14 for the season, but that's a lot of money for an electronic format which has cost the author -nothing- to rerelease.

Re Question 2:
How do we define an episode? I'm thinking as a self-contained story... with a resolution as complete as possible (given the word count). The overarching story arc is treated in each episode but left unresolved. Rather, each acts as a self contained story, introducing its own central plot that is resolved at the end. The series would consist of short stories that happen to share the same characters.

No reliance on dramatic tactics to coerce readers into buying the next -- just a "here's a glimpse into the greater story". Ideally should work if a reader breaks in mid-stream. Like a TV show, one must assume no knowledge of past events. Only core world rules can be assumed (eg airlocks vs transporters). I would cite Stargate as a model to follow. Mind you, I don't like Stargate, but their model is hard to fault. On par with B5, though Straczynski commits the misstep of losing the middle-road consumer

Stargate is a complicated example, don't you think? It had multiple books, 3 TV series, and more movies spun off from a blockbuster movie: simple cowboys in space theme with a tiny core of seed information to remember. SGU TV series,  on the other hand, had to be watched from the beginning, and easily in isolation from the original SG1 in core information, certainly more complicated and engaging, suited to a different sort of audience, continually updated from season 1 through season 2.  Too bad it just sputtered to an end rather than with a planned resolution/finale. To an extent it is what is not right with such serialization in lacking coherence (say, based on a single novel in its beginning to end) that U.S. TV production (versus U.K., generally) do by milking a limited core of seed material to death. Never watched B5 past the second episode - in evidence that this reader of novels takes the liberty of  skipping further into the book to sample what is ahead - making no sense of judging a novel on the basis of the first thousand words or first chapter.