A Day Of Faces by Simon K Jones Page B

browse the internet and there’s always something else to discover. Serialising keeps your story small and manageable, with people able to consume as much or as little as they want, without demanding too much of their time. 1000 to 3000 words per week seems to be a good target, being enough to have some substance but short enough to be read on the train or bus to work, during the lunch hour or in the evening without occupying too much Netflix time.
    You’ll start to develop a cumulative audience. If you release a novel in a singular form, you have once chance to make that launch count. If you turn it into a weekly serial, you have a new promotional opportunity every seven days. Each chapter will bring in some new people, and you’ll gradually gather your readers. They’ll start to get excited about the arrival of a new chapter. Over time, that momentum gives you power.
    Another benefit is that you start to receive feedback on your story before it’s even completed. As long as you don’t let this freak you out - it’s still up to you how much you pay attention to criticism - it can lead to a responsive and exciting way to write. Assuming your work is good, it also acts as the perfect motivational tool - when a new chapter receives a bunch of positive comments, it really helps you get on with the next chapter. It’s an encouraging feedback loop, which simply doesn’t exist if you’re writing a novel in isolation.
    Serialising A Day of Faces has helped me becomes more productive in 2015 than the previous few years combined. And not just with ADoF - I’ve also written two screenplays, have been blogging on a more-or-less weekly basis and have started creating content for my YouTube channel again. I doubt any of that would have happened if I hadn’t embraced serialisation.
     
    Writing tools
    I don’t want to tell you what to use to write, but I will tell you what I use. If you prefer a quill and paper, that’s totally fine. My particular preference is Scrivener, however.
    Scrivener is a word processor of uncommon sophistication and practicality. Word processors - Word, Google Docs - are primarily designed for very short form work: letters, small reports, essays, very short stories. For that kind of thing, they’re great.
    As soon as you move into anything of a larger or more complex form, you need to switch tool. And for prose fiction (and a bunch of other things) that’s where Scrivener comes in.
    Scrivener is a super flexible framework for developing your manuscript, which can then be compiled into all sorts of formats, including PDF, ebook and, yes, Word. Being able to export to multiple formats, perfectly formatted from a single manuscript is an enormous time saver.
    It also provides an interface that perfectly suits the structure of a larger writing project. You can split your story into multiple parts and chapters. There are dedicated areas for storing research, character and location notes, front matter and anything else you might want. You can customise the whole thing to suit your own workflow and the project’s requirements.
    Rather than having an ever-expanding single Word document of scrolly doom, instead Scrivener organises your work in a way that can be seen at a glance. This becomes invaluable when you get to the editing stage, especially if you’re working on something novel-sized. Rather than an impenetrable wall-o-text, you can easily see the flow and structure of your work. You can drill down as precisely as you want.
    On top of that, you need a decent backup and cloud storage system. The former is essential for any kind of work, the latter is useful for writing on the move. If you project is in the cloud, you can grab it from any computer and carry on working. I use Google Drive, but Dropbox is also excellent. These services automatically provide a backup of your work, so even if you forget to manually bury the physical backup in the garden, you’ll still have that online copy.
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