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Books Media

Monthly Serial Novel Magazines? 30

Posted by Cliff from the for-your-reading-pleasure dept.
DeeryQueen asks: "I enjoy reading both regular/text novels and Japanese graphic novels (manga), but while there are a few magazines serializing manga (a few hundred pages each month, consisting of a chapter each from many different graphic novels) with which I am familiar (such as Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat), I don't know where to start looking for US magazines which serialize text novels using this formula. I read all genres. Any recommendations?"
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Monthly Serial Novel Magazines? More

Monthly Serial Novel Magazines?

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  • I enjoy doing some creative writing from time to time, and have done a little of this in the past (an old e-zine that only ran a few issues). I often thought there would be other aspiring authors that might like to contribute to something like this if for no other reason then to get some experience writing and have a already interested audience. The tough thing I thought, would be to differentiate it from a blog, which gives the wrong idea.
  • Invent a time machine and go back to the 19th century [wikipedia.org].

  • Here's my favorite... (Score:3, Funny)

    by parvenu74 ( 310712 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @04:58PM (#12817350)
    I'm partial to the classics from O'Reilly... [oreilly.com]

  • Are you sure you want what you're asking for? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JavaRob ( 28971 ) on Tuesday June 14, 2005 @05:18PM (#12817611) Homepage Journal
    Well, what are you really looking for? Do you like the serial form because it makes you slow down when reading an entire novel, or cuts it up into bite-sized chunks?

    You could always just take a regular novel, slice it up, put each chapter in an envelope, and get a friend to mail them to you one at a time.

    Seriously, this just isn't done much anymore. I know one example -- Dave Eggers was publishing a serial novel on Salon.com [salon.com] (subscription or sommething probably required)... it got up to episode 35 and kind of stopped (was that the end? I don't know) last summer. I'm guessing they abandoned the idea... and frankly, I wasn't reading it anymore, anyway. Serial novels are a form that seems very hard to do well -- the author doesn't get a chance to *revise* when he's painted himself into a corner, plotwise, or when he realizes he's running out of good material; he just has to keep on going, ignoring the inconsistencies and poor story arc and so on.

    I'd say you're better off with a good book. Or... you could do some digging in a good library (ask the reference librarian for help) in finding what you want in old magazines; one of those old serials packed with spies and women on railroad tracks, with a cliff-hanger at the end of every segment could be fun to read.
    • My wife is a librarian and she brought home a few Reader's Digests when the library was throwing them out. "Cool," I thought. I can read summaries of a wide variety of interesting stories.

      I appears that I mistakenly thought that the Reader's Digest was a collection of popular books in brief summary form. It is actually just an ordinary magazine. I looked through three issues. There was nothing more about books than Life, People, or even Playboy. They had home maintenance sections, celebrity gossip se
      • they used to publish condensed versions of novels, but it seems to have gone more "generic mag" lately. I havent read it in a while, but my bonus was always that it fit in one of my cargo pockets. instant portable bathroom reading.
  • Analog Science Fiction & Fact [analogsf.com] runs 3 to 4 part serials pretty regularly. I don't know whether the sum of the parts would be the length of a full-blown novel, but it's something. It's a pretty effective gimmick to keep me subscribing, especially when they run a really good serial, like "Shootout at the Nokai Corral" by Rajnar Vajra.

    • Second the motion on Analog. Their speculative fiction is fun to read, and their science articles are often very interesting, written as it is for an audience of people looking for developments in science which will change the world in perhaps unexpected ways.

    • Analog is probably the best speculative fiction mag out there, though that really says little in itself. Some of their stuff is too esoteric for most readers (including myself--and I read a lot of sf). That serial by Vajra is a prime example. Many Analog writers seem to be trying to outweird each other.
  • Not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but Analog [analogsf.com] and Asimov [asimovs.com] magazines feature short stories, but once or twice per year will serialize a novel. If you prefer mysteries, I imagine similar offerings are available for Ellery Queen [themysteryplace.com] and Hitchcock [themysteryplace.com] magazines.

    There is a Fantasy magazine in the same format, but the name escapes me.
    • You're probably thinking of FSF (Fantasy and Science Fiction). I may be confused, but I seem to recall another similarly titled publication. It may have gone out of business.

      A lot of these, including the venerable and ancient Analog, are published by Dell Magazines. You may be able to find a root listing of sorts if you go though Dell. I subscribe to Analog and I consistently see ads within the magazine for Ellery Queen, Asimov's, etc.

      Even better than the content in Analog and magazines like it is the
      • That is the name of the magazine. I didn't see a mention on the Dell Magazine website. I've been a subscriber to Analog for about five years off and on.

      • Analog and Asimov's also have a great ebook subscription option (I got mine at fictionwise.com). Of course, it has no ads, but it also has no illustrations :-(.

        It's much cheaper for international subscribers, and when I subscribed the paper version, they took months to arrive. Now I get them within a few minutes of release, and read them on my palmtop.

        Much easier to archive, too. I've been reading both Analog and Asimov for about 14 years, and that can take up a lot of shelf space...

        BTW, the June Asimov
  • I serialized a 16-chapter novel of mine online at: http://losangelesnow.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com], if you want to try it. Mind you, it's not science fiction, if that's what you're looking for.
  • Factsheet5 used to be good for finding things like this, but they went "tits up".
  • WebScriptions [webscriptions.net] does this for scifi in ebook form. From their FAQ:

    A web based re-creation of the serialized novel using Science Fiction published by Baen Books. Each novel will be published in three segments, one month apart, beginning 3 months before the actual publication date. Each month 4 books will be available.

    Funnily enough, I don't use that part of their service, but do buy complete books from them a lot. They offer pretty much any format you could want (lit, txt, html, palm, etc.). Wish they co

  • As others have mentioned novel serialization is pretty rare these days. There's no dearth of excellent writing magazines such as Granta, which feature fiction and non-fiction short stories, etc.

    http://www.granta.com/ [granta.com]

    m.
  • Keep It Coming [keepitcoming.net] has serialized novels in several different genres available by subscriptions. Not free, but relatively low-priced.
  • Find an e-book you want to read in a relatively plain format, then take it down to .txt. If it was HTML you don't want any of those <, >, coding characters in there, so copying and pasting the text can be better than resaving a .html file as a .txt.

    Next, use a split command to make your e-book into 4 KiB chunks. On Unix/Linux this is simple enough, do #man split# for details. On Windows there is a bunch of splitting applications left over from the days when files needed to be 1.44 MB for floppy d

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