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I've been eyeing finally diving into the fiction scene but serialized or novelized plotlines might still be beyond me because getting through pain points (creatively, narratively) is something I still suck at. Does stress and deadlines help push you through or just make it worse?

I'd be fine bowing out and sticking to short fiction for now especially with reading about the top earners outputting like 300k words a week. Absolute insanity. No possibility for anything remotely literary coming out of that.

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Jackie, this sounds interesting. Thanks for the information and your assessment of it so far. Vella might even get me back in motion on publishing my big SF novel.

It sounds a lot like the concept that was presented to one of the Austin indie meetings in December of 2019 by the people who started rAthe publishing (https://rathe.app/). Vella sounds more promising, though, because it has the horsepower of Amazon’s market that can make it happen and bring far more potential readers to it. One thing I did not like about rAthe is that they would chop your story to publish in segments that just cut off at or within 10% of 625 words, not at, say, a logical chapter end. Crude. Strange non-genre classifications, and it was a start-up (but seems it is still operating) and who knows how small their paying audience pool actually is?

You spoke about how you’ve run into hurdles to self-publish and find your audience. I’ve found it so daunting to do all the marketing and networking things necessary to self-publish my book that I’ve had to back shelf it and turn my energies elsewhere. I also can’t afford 1k for a secondary pro edit and then maybe a big rewrite. Perhaps I can just parcel out what I have now to this new system and see what happens. At least my novel is long enough that it will last a good while when segmented and serialized like that!

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