[milkoolong]

The same way many empires fell to obsoletion were their inability or lack of foresight to adapt from Blockbuster to Borders to Toys R Us. Music streaming and Cable TV too.

Authors should shift to paid newsletters and drip content over time. Imagine a book with 250 pages would keep your subscription going for a year or two while you work on the next. And once you're about ready to launch the next book, you can compile the "old" content to physical book for a flash sale. Ofc lack of distribution channel and exposure might hurt sales. OTOH, you'd likely see more profit than publishing it whole unless there's a marketing / branding / political advantage.

[dageshi]

Your model exists, it's called royalroad.com coupled with patreon and kindle unlimited. But it's fairly genre specific to Fantasy.

But, it's not a model that really supports high standards, you get typo's, grammar errors, bad prose and quite a lot of filler pages due to the pressure of maintaining the 5 x 1500+ words per week many of the most popular authors work too.

[411111111111111]

It's not specific to rrl, it's pretty much what webnovels are - it's the same at the other platforms too. And there are also some really successful writers that just do it on their own pages.

There is also another source of revenue for them you've omitted: Amazon unlimited.

But besides that I think you're overstating the quality issues. Most successful webnovel authors write really well and have proofreaders before the chapters get released to the general public. Sure, there are extremely bad works too, but they're not really getting money either.

[dageshi]

Is Amazon unlimited different to Kindle unlimited? Because I did mention that.

In terms of typo's, one of the biggest on RR is Defiance of the Fall which has its fair share.

I should be clear, I frankly don't care about typo's or grammar and have about 15 active follows on RR, but it is a major criticism I've seen from other readers who have a harder time tolerating such things. The thing I do have an issue is that often stories are stretched out with tedious filler content because the web serial model relies on regular updates to work, even if the author is stuck or has nothing meaningful to say in order to move the story on.

That being said, I still expect this model to significantly eat into the traditional fiction publishing model because it just has too many advantages for both the readers and the authors.

[screye]

The manga model ?

I'm not sure I like that idea. The best books are edited over multiple times after completion.

I like it as a way for the most hard-core fans to track a work in progress. But not weekly progress as canonical record of the book actually was.

[cercatrova]

Manga writers and artists often redraw or rewrite major portions even after initial online publication. For example, One Punch Man comes to mind which has many redrawn chapters published online before the artist puts it down on printed manga.

[drakonka]

There are many serial services like this, and Amazon recently launched its own with Vella.

This can be a valid model, but in my opinion it would be unfortunate if it totally replaced the model of publishing the entire book at once. These kinds of episodic projects usually require installments that end on some kind of cliffhanger; something to keep readers going to (and paying for) the next installment. While there needs to be a certain amount of this in a book that is published in its entirety as well, the short-episode serial format morphs what the final result looks like to a much greater extent, and not always for the better imo. The goal to meet that market's demand is no longer to produce a complete standalone work, but to drag out the reader's attention for as long as possible episode by episode.