And with self-publishing, there are certainly fewer barriers to getting one’s book out there. Nowadays, it’s a lot more fashionable (and often profitable) to write books that share a fictional world, or characters, or some sort of overarching story. This also meant that an author only had to write the story one part at a time, and could write the next ‘episode’ according to their readers’ reactions to the story.Ĭharles Dickens famously published some of his books in this manner, and a long time later Stephen King revived the format for his novel, The Green Mile. Instead, they’d publish the book bit by bit – in serial format. Stories began to be published in magazines and newspapers but for obvious reasons, it wasn’t realistic to include a full novel in every issue. Serials first became popular in the nineteenth century, as printing costs grew more affordable and reading developed into a more popular pastime. Put simply: a series is a collection of books that all belong to the same “franchise” but can be read in any order (because they’re each a different, self-contained story – even if they connect with one another), whereas a serial is an ongoing narrative which the audience has to read in the correct order so as to follow the plot (so a different kind of series).

It’s just that sometimes the lines between the two get blurred.

There were standalone books, and there were books that shared a universe – whether those books could be read on their own or had to be consumed in the correct order.īut of course there’s a difference between a series and a serial. I’ve seen the same question pop up on our YouTube channel and Facebook groups quite a bit recently: what’s the difference between a series and a serial? I hadn’t really given it much thought before.

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