I’ll have to admit that I am mighty surprised by the lack of discoverable serialized fiction via WordPress Reader. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist, but either WordPress Reader doesn’t recognize the term, people don’t use “serialized fiction” (or variations of it) for tags or categories, or there are just not that many folks publishing such things that are connected to WordPress.
Yes, I am aware of other platforms that have paid subscription and paid models for such things which might improve readership — or perception of “value” — and maybe I’m an idiot for not trying to monetize my writing. But that was never a strong motivator for me.
Added to it is that most writers seem to have a WordPress account that they picked up at one point or another, whereas who really wants another account just to read a fellow blogger’s writing? And almost all of these sites tend to lean into one genre or another, many of which are expecting the readers to pay for access (or the writer to allow access, often at unproven, premium rates).
That said, I will accept that there are other platforms that are designed better than base WordPress for fiction and serialized fiction, and designing a site to be multipurpose, including handling long fiction besides more standard fare (blogs, poetry, one-off fiction pieces, news articles, etc.) can be a royal pain. You often have to think three steps ahead to bake that functionality into your post styles.
I wonder if there might not be a way to approach the whole blogroll/reposting thing to improve discoverability for those of us who tend to enjoy each other’s writing. Search algorithms seem to rely too much on some kind of black box scoring instead of being actually useful at times. And I really don’t care to read 5073 versions of the daily prompt responses out there, which someone decided was the most important metric to promote on the Reader.
Am I just missing the boat here? Have you found it easy to discover things such as serialized content? Do you even look for such things? Are webs serials a royal pain in the tuchus as a reader? Am I the only person who really dislikes the daily writing prompts from Reader?
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