For Immediate Release
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Winslow, ME — Pioneering Maine Science Fiction writers Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are exploring a new approach to publication with the twelfth novel in their internationally acclaimed Liaden Universe®, Fledgling.
Combining aspects of traditional storytelling, where bards and storytellers would deal directly with their public, and the publishing tradition of serializing novels — common in the 17th, 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries and utilized by such luminaries as Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs — Lee and Miller hope to keep Internet readers and fans of their award-winning Liaden Universe® series on the edge of their seats for more than thirty weeks.
On January 22, the first chapter of Fledgling will be posted at http://www.korval.com/fledgling/ for any interested party to read. However, the posting of the subsequent chapter depends on the authors' receiving $300 in reader donations. When that threshold is reached, the next chapter will be posted, and so on until the book is completed.
This way of serializing fiction draws on the ancient "storyteller's bowl" approach. In that model, a storyteller would set out a bowl at the marketplace and begin to tell a story. At a certain point, the bard would stop and wait until a sufficient number of coins had been placed in the bowl before continuing.
Publishing experiments such as Lee and Miller's are taking place more frequently as the Internet allows more readers direct contact with their favorite authors, and science fiction and fantasy authors are, perhaps predictably, taking the lead. Other reader supported serializations in the genre include Diane Duane's The Big Meow, Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Vondish Ambassador, and Don Sakers' Hunt for the Dymalon Cygnet. Such productions seem to work best for writers with an established fan base, like Lee and Miller, who have been Guests of Honor and speakers at science fiction conventions, schools, and libraries from California to New Brunswick.
Although traditionally published by publishers such as Ace, Del Rey, and Meisha Merlin in the US as well as by an assortment of foreign publishers in German, Polish, and Russian, Lee and Miller have a long history of reaching out to their readership in alternative formats. As early as 1986 they published The Naming of Kinzel, a chapbook collection, to finish a series started in Fantasy Book magazine before it ceased operations. They were also early adopters of electronic books in the late 1980s and early 1990s as BPLAN Virtuals. In 1995 they founded SRM Publisher in response to fan requests on the Internet for more Liaden Universe® short stories.
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