Serialized RSS works well

Last October I posted about the serialized RSS feed I set up for Cory Doctorow’s novel, Someone comes to town, Someone leaves town. It got posted on Boing Boing so subscriber numbers for the serial feed shot up to over 600 almost immediately, before dropping back as those early subscribers got to the end of the book a month later.

That was cool. But just as cool, I think, is that since that time the subscriber numbers have remained steady at around 200 subscribers, so as people finish the book over 30 days there’s still new people subscribing. And the comments have been pretty positive, making me think that people quite like getting fiction in their feed readers. Perhaps it is still a novelty thing, or perhaps a little fiction delivered along with the news to your aggregator is quite a nice diversion.

In any event, I am bouyed by this success and am working on providing more serial content in this way. I am fully employed again now, so it’ll take me longer to do this stuff, but any suggestions would be welcome.

UPDATE: BTW, you can subscribe to Cory Doctorow’s previous novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, here:

[subscription link won't show up in your feed reader]