So, the work has officially begun - my first proper foray into a self-published piece. My Zombie Shark Highway Series is coming to Substack, I’ll be publishing serially on Authorstrator but what’s really new for me is that I will also be dropping the ebooks exclusively for Goody Tier subscribers! I’m working hard on formatting this book that was actually written on the Wattpad platform (there’s no Word doc anywhere, oops) into an ebook which is so tedious but also kind of really super fun. I actually love it and kind of wish I formatted books as my day job.
ANYWAY. The Zombie Shark Highway series started as a joke back in…2013? 2014? Peak Sharknado craze. And since then, it has ballooned into a four-book series, hundreds of thousands of reads, a lengthy period in Wattpad’s Paid Stories program and endlessly wonderful reader reactions and reviews. This one was a particularly fun surprise.
It’s not exactly like the characters and situations themselves are funny but we take the gore seriously. It’s more like the sharks are freaking zombies that piledrive down highways like angry motorboats going after dumb people and that’s hilarious.
So I’ve been living with my zombified water monsters for - WOW - 10 years!
And I am actively writing the finale - Mega Worm Apocalypse.
Why am I telling you this? Because these stories were written to be published online, in a serial format. At the time, I wanted to explore opportunities outside traditional publishing. I wanted to see what platforms like Wattpad had to offer writers, what opportunities and experiences writing serially online could bring, and whether or not writing serially online could be a part of my professional life as an author. That was whole purpose of writing these stories. They were never conceived to be commercially published. They were created specifically for online serial publishing.
Now, my wheelhouse as a writer is middle grade and YA fantasy/sci fiction for traditional publishing. I wouldn’t consider myself an expert in serial and the field is vast with as many opinions as there are writers. Different genres have different expectations from their readers and one size does not fit all. But, since it’s been 10 years of writing and publishing ZSH for an online audience, I’ve learned a lot about serial fiction. And so, on this smokey July 1st, as I package up my beloved undead fish monsters and their equally undeadly monstrous cousins to start publishing on Substack, I thought I’d share what I learned.
MEAGHAN’S LESSONS FOR WRITING SERIAL FICTION ONLINE
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