Shadowmarching off...

July 24, 2002 | 0 Comments

On June 20th, Tad Williams announced that his online serial story Shadowmarch was shutting down. His reasons were good ones. He didn’t have enough time or enough subscribers to keep it going. Pretty simple. As a full time writer he needed to devote his efforts to paying the bills - and that means publishing books.
It was a good experiment, and I think allot can be learned from it. I ponied up the 17 duckets to become a subscriber, and for the most part I thought it was money well spent - especially all the extras that came with the serial itself. But when it came down to actually reading the installments of the story I found myself printing them out, and actually wishing I had it in book form.
I don’t thing online publishing will ever completely replace print. Period. Books will never go away. That is a great thing. I love books.
I think there is a place for this kind of publishing, and maybe in the future things like Shadowmarch will succeed. And I truly hope they will - as long as they publish the final product in book form for us old timer who can deal with them fancy ‘puterized gadgets.
A side note - just incase your curious, Tad does intend to publish the Shadowmarch story as a series of novels and keep the Web site as a supplement to the series. Now, that is what the Web is great at.

Filed under: Web General