How to manage a web serial (without losing your mind)
As the economy gets worse and publishing deals fall through, we’ve seen a lot of authors turn to serial fiction projects. We’re quite avid fans of a few! However, it seems that most authors don’t know how to properly manage a web serial. Because they’re doing things the hard way, they introduce little glitches into the process — and spend more time than they need to on technical issues. We see the same problems over and over:
Formatting. Your manuscript is probably in Word. When you try to save as HTML or paste the chapter into a web editor, everything gets screwed up: your curly quotes turn into weird symbols, your em dashes turn into square boxes, and your line breaks sometimes disappear altogether.
Scheduling. You want to publish your new chapters at roughly the same time every week (or month, etc.). Yet, you have a life (such as it is). You can’t guarantee that you’ll be at home in front of the computer at 9 a.m. on a Monday two months from now.
Consistency. You’ve built a lovely design for your serial, but every time you copy a new chapter into your template, something goes wrong — a fiddly bit in the footer disappears, or a background image at the top gets cut off for no apparent reason.
Linking. Every new chapter has to be added to the table of contents, and you really ought to have ‘next’ and ‘previous’ links on each chapter for easier navigation… but sometimes you forget to add links to the latest installment in all the right places.
Announcing. Not only do you have to be there at 9 a.m. on Monday to publish your new chapter, but you have to alert people that it’s up. Do you keep a mailing list so you can send emails? Do you build an RSS feed? Do you use Twitter, Facebook, or LiveJournal?
Managing all this with flat HTML files, formatted and linked by hand, is an enormous pain. There is a better way! You can automate all these aspects of publishing a serial. Set it all up in advance, and all you have to worry about is producing those installments.
Solutions
First: you need WordPress. There are a lot of reasons we advocate using this software to manage most websites, and all of them will come into play when you’re running a serial.
What if you don’t have WordPress? Then you need to get WordPress, and the good news is that it’s quite easy. Most commercial web hosting plans include everything you need, and many of them will let you install WordPress in one click from your control panel.
If your current host doesn’t allow you to run WordPress, it’s worth switching to one that does. Deal with the headache now and save yourself regular headaches for the duration of your serial. There’s a list of compatible hosts at wordpress.org. We have not been thrilled with Media Temple or Dreamhost, but we have had excellent experiences with MDDHosting and WestHost, where the basic plans are enough to handle your serial. (We are not affiliated with any hosting companies, so we don’t have a financial interest in telling you this stuff.) If you want to chat about your particular situation, drop us a note or leave a comment.
Once you’re sure that your host offers everything you need, installing WordPress is a snap even if you can’t do it from your site’s control panel. WordPress is, in fact, famous for its five-minute installation — and it doesn’t even take that long if you gather the information you need beforehand. Specifically, you need the details about the MySQL database your host has provided: its name, its host (usually ‘localhost’), your username, and your password. Enter these things into the installer’s form, press the button, and off you go.
Assuming everything went smoothly, you’re all set up with WordPress. Now what?
Setting Up Your Serial
Formatting
There are a number of ways you can deal with Word-to-WordPress issues:
Paste from Word. Even if you’ve been using WordPress for a while, you might have overlooked this handy button on the Visual editor’s toolbar. If your visual editor’s toolbar has just one row of buttons, press the one labeled “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink.” In the second row, you’ll see a clipboard with the Word logo on it. Press this button, and you’ll get a pop-up screen where you can paste the contents of your Word file. Press “Insert,” and your post now contains the cleaned-up contents of your Word file.
Wordoff.org. Save your Word file as HTML, then open it in a plain text editor — anything that will let you copy the HTML source code. (Opening the file in a browser and viewing the source will work.) Paste the HTML into the handy box at wordoff.org and press the button. It’ll clean up Word’s gunk and return usable HTML. Copy that into the the HTML view on your WordPress post editing screen.
The Word Unmunger. If you have a Mac, you can use the Word Unmunger via the handy Automator script I wrote. The Unmunger cleans up Word-generated HTML files, and the Automator script lets you use the Unmunger without dealing with the command line. Download both to your desktop, open the Automator application, choose your Word files, and go. It’ll save over the originals. You can then open those up and paste the HTML into the HTML view on your WordPress post editing screen.
Scheduling
Scheduled publishing is one of WordPress’s greatest features. Enter your post into WordPress ahead of time, then click “Edit” in the “Publish immediately” line in the Publish box. Change the date and time (using a 24-hour clock), then hit “OK.” You can preview your post, but it’ll be hidden from the world until the date you’ve chosen.
Consistency
WordPress keeps posts and templates separated until a visitor arrives, and then it assembles the page for them. Because you’re not editing the templates when you edit a post, your chances of breaking the page are greatly reduced.
Bonus tip: put your donation link in your template’s footer. That way you won’t have to remember to add it every time, and your readers will see it as soon as they finish each chapter.
Linking
WordPress uses configurable widgets to let you adjust what appears on your site’s sidebars (or footer, in some cases). However, none of the built-in widgets are quite right for displaying a serial’s table of contents.
Install the Category Posts Widget and add it to your sidebar. Call it something obvious (“Contents” is good), and if you’re not sure how many installments your serial will have, use a large number (like 999) for the number of posts to show.
Most WordPress themes include next/previous links on individual post pages. If yours doesn’t, just open up single.php and locate this line:
<?php endforeach; ?>
Below it, add this:
<div class="navigation"> <div class="alignleft"><?php previous_posts_link(); ?></div> <div class="alignright"><?php next_posts_link(); ?> </div> <div class="clear"><!-- --></div> </div>
Now your readers should be able to move back and forth between chapters or choose one from the table of contents along the side of your page.
Announcing
WordPress includes RSS and Atom feeds, which will let your readers subscribe to your serial — if they know how to use feeds. For the less savvy readers in your audience, you might want to offer some alternatives.
Feedburner is an excellent service that allows you to track the number of people subscribed to your feeds — something WordPress is not very good at on its own. However, it also allows your readers to subscribe via email if they prefer. You’ll get the HTML code for a simple signup form. Paste it into a text widget and you’re all set.
If you have a following on LiveJournal — or if you think you will — the LJ crosspost plugin will let you post your serial to a LiveJournal account automatically every time you publish something in WordPress. As of this writing, the most recent version (2.0.6) doesn’t work well with the latest versions of WordPress (2.8.x), so you’ll need to use an earlier version. If you can’t find 2.0.5, let us know and we’ll send you a copy.
Many people prefer Twitter updates to feeds or email, especially since they can set up Twitter to text their mobile phones when you publish something. Twitter Tools is a great plugin that can automatically post to your Twitter account when you publish a post. It will shorten long URLs for you, and you can have it append a hashtag if you want.
You can also update your Facebook status when you have a new post. There are a number of ways to do it, but I like the Twitter application in Facebook. Add it to your profile, feed it your Twitter account details, and it’ll hum along happily with no further intervention from you.
All of these tools respect scheduled publishing dates. Once everything in place, you could (in theory) schedule a month’s worth of installments all at once and then take off on a wilderness retreat while your website does the work for you.
To sum up…
Your posts will be published on time.
Your readers will be instantly alerted via RSS, Atom, email, LiveJournal, Twitter, or Facebook. (Or half a dozen other things we haven’t covered; search the WordPress plugin directory for any other services that interest you.)
Readers can donate via the link that’s automatically included in your site’s footer.
And you’re off eating an ice cream cone, or obsessively checking your Google Alerts, or hiking the Himalayas… or writing the next installment.