Part One in Evan Wood’s quest to find out what’s up with serialized fiction.

by Evan Wood

The last installation of Rachel Cusk’s Outline came out in The Paris Review’s fall 2014 issue. Until recently, The Review hadn’t serialized a novel since 1971.

The Paris Review isn’t the only outlet experimenting with this all-but-forgotten format. Just over a year ago The Wall Street Journal published a piece called “The Return of the Serial Novel,” which detailed how St. Martin’s Press and internet omni-store Amazon had launched serial platforms.

Since Lorin Stein became editor in April 2010, The Paris Review has serialized two novels. The first was The Third Reich by Roberto Bolaño, which began with the Spring 2011 issue, and the second was Outline.

As Stein puts it, “for the Review, (serialization) makes a certain kind of sense.” According to him, the The Paris Review‘s readers generally don’t throw away their copies, making it easy to refer back to an earlier installment in a serial. In an email, Stein described the magazine as being built to last and “a thing to collect.”

The Paris Review’s decision to serialize probably doesn’t have much to do with trends in the publishing industry at large. Especially not when you consider the demographics of its audience. The median age of their readers is 41—close to industry standard, slightly younger in fact—and a full 91.1 percent of them have graduated college. They travel—nearly 50 percent of them have taken four or more round-trip flights in the last 12 months—and their median household income is $104,342. They have time to read, and an active interest in doing so.

Put simply, The Paris Review doesn’t have to follow trends to stay afloat. But even so, mainstream serialization has been going through what some have called a comeback in the last few years.

Amazon launched Kindle Serials in 2012, and put out 30 books on its e-reader in the first year. St. Martin’s followed suit the same year, publishing five serials online.

In 2013, DailyLit partnered with digital publishing studio Plympton and began releasing original work in serial. And while Plympton and DailyLit publish existing works as well as original fiction, newcomer JukePop is currently serializing new books exclusively, using a system where readers vote for works they like, which translates into money for the author.

So what’s the impetus for a revival like this? To answer that question, it’s tempting to turn to our cultural fear of technology and its latest victim: attention spans. A number of publications have explored some iteration of this fear in the last two years alone, exploring social media, the internet more broadly, and how this affects children. In one article about waning attention spans, HP technologist Alvaro Retana predicts that “we will probably see a stagnation in many areas [by the year 2020]: technology, even social venues such as literature.

But do publishers really think they’re going to get people to read books by capitalizing on their unwillingness to pay attention to them in full-format? That conclusion is most likely a myopic one. Rooster, a new app developed by Plympton, pairs contemporary and classic literature together, and delivers daily installments to subscribers in easily digestible chunks. At first glance, it looks like a direct response to shortening attention spans. In fact, co-founder of Plympton Publishing Jennifer Lee agrees our attention spans have “declined in [the] last hundred years.”

But is Rooster engineered to take advantage of that idea? At its core, the app is an undeniably savvy marriage of literature and technology. Here, the two supposedly combative mediums work together.

“As writing moves from print to digital, you change the economics of printing and distribution,” writes Lee in a text message, “if you assume people are reading on an always-connected, always-with-them device, the things you publish are very different.”

She’s referring to serializing, but also to Rooster’s daily installment approach. According to Lee, the digital era’s optimal format is relatively short works being pushed directly to readers. And that’s exactly what Rooster does.

Go to Rooster’s website and notice how, in its mission, Rooster references morning commutes and waiting in line at the DMV. The app seems to care more about filling in those short gaps of free time in your day than how long you can stay focused.

Netflix struck a major blow to the argument that attention spans are evaporating when it released an entire season of House of Cards in a single day. In fact, House of Cards is cited as a model by Rooster’s co-founder Yael Goldstein Love in an interview with thewritepractice.com, and by St. Martin’s Press publisher-at-large Dan Weiss in the WSJ article. Both of them mention it as an example of how to time the release of their content—drawing parallels between episodes of the show and installments of their serials.

If you can sit in front of a screen watching a series–House of Cards or otherwise–for hours, then maybe it’s your patience rather than your attention span that is in short supply. If producers of literature and TV shows can entertain their audiences sufficiently, they may find that modern attention spans are fairly elastic.

But that’s where the serial shines. It is inseparable from its uniquely non-committal format. If you don’t like the first installment, don’t pick up the next one. As Goldstein Love points out, it was through this feedback that nineteenth-century periodicals and authors were able to build audiences and market-test their work.

Publishers need you to read their books in order to make money, and in the internet age, that means standing out in a crowded sea. They respond to trends like any company, and the trends that pointed them to serials are our collective penchant for all-digital-everything and our time deficits.

To say that the serial novel has returned seems premature, but if it does come back it’s going to start with you and how you spend those 20-minute bus rides and waits in line that punctuate your day.