Serials are Back!

I got some exciting news today.  eSteampunk Magazine, a new spinoff from eFiction Magazine, is picking up my new steampunk serial, Black Dragon Blues.  It's the globe-trotting adventures of Molly, inventor and tinkerer, and Lan, the dangerous young woman sworn to protect her, as they are hunted by the Kung Fu assassins of the Black Dragon gang.  Subscribe to eSteampunk Magazine, or visit eFiction on the web.

A few different online magazines are publishing a mixture of serial episodes and stand-alone stories.  In addition to some of the eFiction spinoff titles, there's Steampunk Tales, which promises "The 'Penny Dreadful' for your iPhone."  Check them out at http://www.steampunktales.com/.

It's a brave new pulp-fiction world out there.  Amazon has a fascinating new feature called Amazon Serials, where you pay once for a novel that gets released in episodes.  The moment you buy, you get every installment that's been released so far, and each new installment as it's released.  They're including some of Charles Dickens' books, which were released as serials back in the day.

Not every writer can release their work in progress as a serial.  There are some significant quality checks in place, which is good news for readers.  Check it out at http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=5044445011.  

Then there are smaller players, like JukePop Serials, available at http://www.jukepopserials.com.  The good thing about this innovative new site is that it's a curated collection of episodic stories.  That means that an editor is making some careful choices and only releasing the good stuff.  It's not just crap from any hack who has learned how to type and thinks he can tell a story.  

JukePop is new, so there aren't a huge number of episodes available for any one story.  It will be interesting to see how well the site does.  On the plus side, it's free, there's a rich variety of stories available, and some sort of quality is being maintained.  On the down side, it's web-based only, and being new, you never know when the capital will run out and the site will close its doors.  I'd say it's worth the risk, though.

I just read a couple of chapters of The Case of the Syphillitic Sister, a quirky, hilarious, and endlessly surprising story of a superhero detective agency with a VERY strange case.  It's by the talented James Hutchings, whom I've blogged about before.  Horizon, by John Gregory Betancourt, looks quite promising as well.  It's a much more serious work of space opera.

Visit JukePop, vote for the stories you like, and help this nifty new venture succeed.  I want to find out how the story ends.