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The serial novel gets an update
March 11, 2007
By Katie Haegele
Ah, the email inbox. Home to office memos, rapid-fire flirtation, and Nigerian scam spam. And... novels?
Why not? Take *Suzanne*, a new piece of fiction written by Toronto, Canada-based writer Michael Betcherman—and published via email.
To read the novel—a social-mores story about a widow on the hunt for a new rich husband—the user visits emailmystery.com/suzanne and pays $4.99. The automated system sends out nearly 100 more over the next three weeks or so, as the story unfolds in real-time.
But email isn’t just the vehicle for sending and receiving the novel; it’s also the form. The experience of reading *Suzanne* is of peeking in on emails between the different characters, as though the reader were cc’ed on their messages.
*Suzanne*, which has been on the market for about two months, is actually Betcherman’s second email novel. His first was *The Daughters of Freya*, a mystery he co-wrote with his friend David Diamond, a California-based writer and journalist.
"David suggested we write a novel composed entirely of emails. We originally thought of publishing it in print form but a friend suggested that since the book was written in email form, it should be delivered that way too," Betcherman explained.
Freya was launched in November of 2004, and to date it has attracted a few thousand subscribers, Betcherman said. After a lot of cold calling, he was able to get it reviewed like a traditional book (including a favorable review by Marietta Dunn in the Inquirer).
Email fiction of one kind of another has probably been around for a while. Writer and Web pioneer Carl Steadman wrote Two Solitudes, an exchange between two characters, in 1994, and sent carbon copies to the piece's audience.
Betcherman charges $4.99 for a subscription to his story—about the price of a pulpy paperback—which suggests he considers it competitive with print books.
"Although the concept has attracted a lot of attention from people interested in digital media, I think the majority of our subscribers are traditional readers. As cool as the concept is—or so people keep telling me—in the final analysis we are selling a story," Betcherman said.
"That being said, since our stories are told in bite-sized portions, I think there is a potential audience of people who like stories (who doesn't?) but aren't necessarily attracted by traditional books. The trick is going to be to figure out how to reach them. For example, serialized installments may appeal to people who watch soap operas but don't necessarily read a lot of books," he said.
And, of course, the fact that the emails arrive over a few weeks’ time makes Suzanne less like a bound book and more like the serialized stories of 19th-century newspapers.
"The technique transforms the reading experience—readers can't turn a page to find out what happened, they have to wait for the next email to arrive," Betcherman said.
Still, Suzanne isn’t simply a novel in bits rather than ink. Online publishing also allows Betcherman to achieve a certain level of intertextuality.
"Just like regular email, some of the emails link to external websites we've created for the project,” he said, such as fake newspaper and magazine articles that enhance the story.
And like so many online publishers, Betcherman has found that the old-media marketing model doesn’t necessarily apply.
"Reviews [of Freya] were crucial to give us credibility but we soon found that they were only of limited help with sales. Each review would lead to a spike in sales but within a few days it was old news. Since then, we've been looking for partners who have significant website traffic to help us market the book."
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