Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: I am talking to web serial novelist Dee Dee Webb. Dede Webb has written several web serial novels since, I believe, 2014, such as the gods are bastards, only villains do that. And most recently, Horde. Dede Webb, welcome to write on radio.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: So what is a web serial novel, and why did you choose this format over others?
[00:00:29] Speaker B: A web serial novel is a serial novel which is on the web. It's basically like the serials of old. It is written chapter by chapter and published that way. Except rather than being printed in any kind of legacy media, the chapters go up on the Internet. And the way this can be done depends on the author and the situation. There are serialized novels that have their own websites. There are a lot of platforms, websites that are dedicated to this format and have lots of authors working on them. As for why I chose it, it was honestly kind of a necessity, a business decision, to the point that it was barely a choice. I spent the earliest parts of my attempt at a writing career the same way everyone else does, just bashing my nose against invisible walls, you know, the process of basically having to beg agents and publishers for a moment of their attention. And eventually, when I stumbled across web serials, I figured, well, I'm not getting anywhere the traditional way. Let me try this. I tried it, and it worked out pretty well for me, all things considered.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: That's awesome.
When did you find web serials and what kind of drew you to them?
[00:01:54] Speaker B: It's hard for me to remember exactly when I first discovered this.
I have a mild case of memory problems due to long time depression, but I think it was around that general time. I didn't waste much time before diving in. Once I realized this was the thing. The one thing I do recall is I came across one of the most famous web serials, of course, which is worm by wild bow. That one is still a defining monolith of the medium, and I ran through that. It's a huge work of fiction. It took me a few weeks, and I'm a fast reader. I absolutely loved it, and I think that was a big part of what gave me the impetus to try one of my own.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: Speaking of long works, how do you keep up such a prolific amount of writing, the equivalent of several series of novels in the time that many traditional authors might only write a few?
[00:02:54] Speaker B: Part of that has to do with the fact that there is a lot less busy work involved in a serialized publication of any kind. Like a novel has a whole production phase. It has to be fully edited. It has multiple people working on it. There are marketing campaigns. There's cover art. I've been through this process recently, a few times with my own publisher, as I've moved into that from the web serial platforms.
So, yeah, there's just a lot more that goes into it that you don't have to worry about when you're publishing by yourself one chapter at a time.
But to be honest, the big answer to that question for me is that prolific is relative.
Like, I actually, this is going to sound boastful, but I'll explain where I'm coming from in a second. I have written the equivalent of about 20 novels since the last Game of Thrones title. And that's something I say because it's something I have to remind myself of, because rather than thinking of myself as prolific, I tend to compare myself with the big standouts in my field.
But there are people who absolutely leave me in the dust in terms of the amount of content they're able to produce. There's one of the big names in serials is the author of the Wandering in Pirate Ava, who writes these ten to 20,000 word chapters twice a week. I mean, she puts out the equivalent of an average novel every two weeks, and I dare at that, in just absolute stupefaction. And what that is is someone who just happens to have a knack that I don't. And I just try to remind myself I do what I can at my own pace. I'm a little faster than some other people would be. I'm not as fast as some people are, but ultimately thinking about how much I put out and how quickly is just not a productive way of looking at the craft. So I do my best not to, as much as I can.
[00:05:02] Speaker A: Several years ago, read Piridaba's wandering in, and I caught up, and now I am hopelessly behind because it is so.
[00:05:17] Speaker B: She'll leave you in the dust very quickly.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
So you were talking about how you don't have to go through as much busy work with a web serial novel.
Do you have the ability to go through an editing phase before posting your work?
And if not, how does it feel to release your work without the security of the traditional editing process?
[00:05:45] Speaker B: I do edit, and if you're publishing in any capacity, even self publishing, you should be editing. There's really no excuse not to do editing of any kind.
What that ends up looking like for serialists depends on the individual. In my case, after I have finished a chapter and posted it on Patreon for my backers, I leave it there to percolate. So I gain some distance from it, and then before I migrate it to the public platform I use, I go back and edit each chapter thoroughly, chapter by chapter. That's just my own process. A lot of people in this space use beta readers to help with their editing. I don't personally no objection to the practice, I'm just someone who works better by myself, but that's a way to go about it. But it does come with some downsides. Like if you're not getting professional editing, if you're doing your own self editing, there are going to be more typos and little slips than a professionally edited manuscript would have.
Something you just kind of have to accept about working in this publishing space. For my part, I have occasionally gone back and changed things in my stories, and I've kind of made a point of practice not to do that any when I'm just working for myself. When I've been picked up by publishers and worked with them, they do a much more thorough editing job. And of course I'm happy to work with that and do the changes that are deemed necessary, because in my experience, those changes are always for the benefit of the work. But just working on my own. Once I've posted it online, I try to leave it alone. The only times I have really gone back in and changed things were to fix plot holes I accidentally created, which fortunately has been uncommon. I think that's only happened once or twice, and on one other occasion to remove a word that I have been in this space long enough for the culture to have shifted around me a bit, and something that had been just a word people use when I was a kid came to be regarded as a slur. So I decided slurs have no place in my work, and I personally thought this cultural development was a good one and I should comply with that. So I cleaned that up a little bit. But for the most part, yeah, you're correct. You lack the security of a thoroughly edited work. It's a real privilege to work with an actual guild editor, and I enjoy it when I'm able to, perhaps even more, because most of the time I don't get to wow, cool.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: So many authors in traditional publishing have to have other forms of income.
Is this true for you as well? And what ways can you make money with a web serial? And what ways have you made money with a web serial novel?
[00:08:52] Speaker B: Personally, my writing is my sole income at this point in my life, and I feel incredibly privileged by that, because that's nothing even the case for a number of professionally published authors.
The ways to make money is really to view it as content creation. So I get funded basically the same way, like youtubers and musicians and streamers do. I have a patreon. People pledge there to support me sometimes just because they want to support me, sometimes because I have different tiers with different levels of access. One of the benefits I offer is advanced readership for, like I mentioned before, get to see chapters early before they go up for the public. I also accept donations, and I have sometimes accepted commissions to write specific themes.
I try not to do that as much because it's harder for me when I'm not following my own inspiration, but that's still a worthwhile and perfectly valid way to do it.
But of course, this is very much a your mileage will vary thing. When I first started out, I was writing basically for exposure as a hobby, as a creative exercise. I was publishing regularly, two to three chapters a week for two years before I made any money at all. And that's just because I didn't take steps to. I could have set up a Patreon or donation button at any time. I just didn't until I, I think it was a car repair that I needed, and I decided to try and monetize my hobby, but.
And two years after that, it was my full time income. Wow. So the exact timing there will depend on the individual and the circumstance. It's just a matter, like with any kind of online content creation, of finding your niche, finding your audience, and being consistent.
[00:10:53] Speaker A: Yeah, that is so cool. You have been quite open at times about your mental and physical health and how that can affect the rate at which you write.
Are there any particular methods or strategies that you use to keep writing when these problems arrive?
[00:11:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I have lived with depression basically my entire adult life, and it varies between barely an issue and just debilitatingly bad.
The ways for coping with things like that are highly individual. I'm not exactly comfortable offering advice on how to deal with depression that verges into spaces that I think medical professionals should occupy. But one thing I have found as a content creator, as a writer who lives with it, is the vital importance of just being transparent and open and forthright with my audience about it.
And that's really difficult to do when you're looking at it from the process of first opening up to people about something which is so intensely personal. Like, I have vivid recollections of the first time I first spoke to my own family about the fact that I was suffering from depression. I mean, it felt like coming out of the closet it was hard to do and intense, and that's irrational. Like after the fact, I understood fully. Well, of course no one's going to blame me for this. That only makes sense. But it's very common, when you're first looking at that prospect, for it to be very emotionally hard.
If you're going to live as a depressed writer or any kind of content creator, it is crucially important to let people know what's up with you, to stay in communication. And that's what I've done. I started doing it and have kept doing it for the sake of sheer professionalism, really. I mean, I approach it with the attitude that if I have something happening in my life, which causes the chapters that people expect to be delayed, it's the basic professional correct thing to do, to let everyone know what's going on and why.
And in the course of doing this, I've had a couple of surprising discoveries, one of which is that the vast majority of people are incredibly supportive about this. They're very understanding, and I don't know if that would have been the case, like just maybe 20 years ago, but mental health is becoming more of a widely discussed topic, and I think more people get it nowadays.
But another thing that's come up that has really encouraged me is a lot of people over the years have told me how much that helps them. To see someone who is maintaining a successful career as a writer, as a creator, while grappling with a lot of the things that they are, that it helps to encourage them to show that it is possible to do it.
That just feels really good to me. I mean, I would keep, even if no one had said that, I would keep being open and honest, because, like I said, professionalism. I feel like I have to when it causes me to miss an update day, but knowing that it actually makes a difference to someone. I mean, I'm just an entertainer. At the end of the day, all I want is to create something fun that makes people happy for a little while. And the rare occasions when something I do makes a real difference, that's the kind of stuff that keeps me going when things get really hard.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: So your stories are serialized in such a way that you are writing them week by week. How far in advance do you plan out your stories?
Have you ever had to change direction based on how the story has changed while you've written it?
[00:14:52] Speaker B: I think I've never had to change direction, but sometimes I have anyway. My creative process for building a story is to a large extent involuntary. I mean, to the point that I feel like I don't necessarily even decide what story I'm going to work on.
I have kind of a primordial soup in my head of all kinds of concepts and bits and pieces of stories, like snatches of dialogue, characters, jokes, setting, and world building details. And it all kind of just roils around in my subconscious until various pieces begin accumulating together into the structure of a story.
And the method I use for plotting is eventually, when I have something that's formed well enough that I want to make an actual story of it. The mark I have for that is that there are a series of what I think of as high points, and they could be just about anything.
Action scenes, lines of dialogue, things that I know are going to hit well and be really satisfying for readers when they come up and they form a rough outline of what the plot would be. And then my task of actually writing, of actually building the story, the process is connecting them. You have to build a scaffolding of linear events from one to the other in a way that makes sense, keeping mind setting in, setting up all the pins that I want to knock down at those high points.
And that's just my own method. I think that would that's how I would do it, even if I wasn't writing serially.
So I know every writer's method is different. I'm sure I'm not the only one who does it this way, and I wouldn't judge anyone who does it completely differently, but so far it has worked for me pretty well.
[00:16:54] Speaker A: Awesome.
As a web serial novelist, you have a lot of people who can comment and talk about the story as you're writing it.
Do you take commenters advice and criticism into consideration when writing an ongoing series?
How do you balance advice and criticism against your own desires and ideas for the story?
And does the fact that you are sometimes making money from the people commenting make it difficult to ignore critical comments that might not help the story?
[00:17:31] Speaker B: The advice I follow in writing, which I would recommend to anyone else attempting the serial path, is to always listen to what your commenters want and never give it to them. You have to follow your own inspiration and create the art that you want to see, because I earnestly believe that is the only way to make the best work of art that you can. I have worked following other people's directions, and it's okay. I've produced work that's okay, but it's never going to be my best. So when it comes to commenters, I do pay attention to what they think and how they react and what they say, what they like, what they don't like. And that has in fact helped me shape the story. But not because I ever do what they want, I specifically don't. But the things that they catch on to and start thinking about and talking about are sometimes not the things that I would have on my own. And seeing people reacting in real time can often encourage me to think about new aspects of the story, and that can determine what I end up focusing more on and how things develop. So yes, I do.
I am very firm that no one tells me what I'm going to write, even for my financial backers. As you asked about this is I have times and plan to in the future offer as a reward tier. People being able to vote on topics for me to work on. That's harder for me to do, but it's worth it for.
It's good exercise creatively, but for the most part, yeah, I'm just going to write the story that I want to write. And if you're going to support me, that's the term you accept. And a lot of people seem to be satisfied with that. They want to see what I have to say.
But you should never become too disconnected from your audience because you'd be missing out on a big opportunity to see your own work through fresh eyes and find things in it that you might not have thought to develop on your own. I've benefited greatly from paying attention and reacting to what my commenters have had to say, even though I don't let them call the shots.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: You said that your writing has kind of grown from listening to commenters and also just writing. How do you feel about your earlier work and how do you feel you've grown as a writer?
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Honestly, I think I feel about it exactly the way anyone else who has been doing it professionally ten years. Like you can't practice something for a decade at the pace I have and not gotten better at it. I go back and see my earlier work and some of it's fine, some of it is absolutely ghastly.
I'm pretty sure that's the universal experience of all writers and all artists of any kind. It's just you learn by doing. And one thing about serialization is that it keeps you doing. It's regular practice. You're going to put out multiple chapters a week most of the time, and that will help you hone your craft.
[00:20:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
So getting down into the weeds a little bit more, you have moved from your stories having their own WordPress site to releasing your stories on specifically the Royal Road website.
What motivated this move?
[00:21:04] Speaker B: When I first started out writing my first serial, I published it on its own WordPress site because at the time I was very inexperienced. I was looking around at what the successful writers in the space were doing and I saw some of the big names had done that. So that's what I did. Over time I came to realize that having your own, each story having its own dedicated, self hosted website is a flex. It's not a necessity, it's something that you kind of build up to. And in fact it's a pretty significant disadvantage when you're trying to start out because the aggregate sites, the hosting services that are actually designed for people to create and to read fiction have built in discovery mechanisms. It's a shortcut to getting your audience, that's the main advantage of doing that. So I would always recommend people to start out there at this point. My first story still has this dedicated website because that's how I've been doing it forever and I don't intend to take it down even as WordPress has grown harder and harder to use over the years. But all my subsequent things I've just published on Royal Road and that's helped them a lot to get picked up initially.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: Awesome.
I guess going off of that, how has the community or culture surrounding web serial novels changed over the years that you have been writing them?
[00:22:36] Speaker B: That's a little hard for me to tell because the main change that I've navigated is the one I just talked about is I moved from operating fully in my own space that I had complete control over to going to Royal Road to the publishing site where I'm one member of a community and that kind of overshadowed all the other developments that I've been able to see. I do know that web fiction guide, which is a website that was a big deal in the space when I was starting out, has really tapered off. I'm actually not sure if it still exists anymore. There's a ranking site, top web fiction, which still exists and is used, but I haven't even bothered to register my own stories with it anymore. It's just the discovery mechanisms built into the site I use takes care of all of that without any additional effort from me.
So I would probably have a better answer for this if I had paid more attention to things going on.
Not directly under my nose, but I, you know, I'm living here with chronic depression, doing all I can to write my little stories, and I have a tendency to miss out on things that aren't immediately relevant to me.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: Totally understandable.
Are there any authors or stories that influenced how you write? Are your inspirations mostly from traditional books, or are there websterian novelists that have influenced your writing?
[00:24:08] Speaker B: Well, I have to say the obligatory I want to be Brandon Sanderson when I grow up. But actually, for the most part, I have actively tried not to be directly influenced by specific writers or works, which is because I am inherently influenced by everything I read. I think we all are.
When I look back at my earlier work, particularly before I had been doing it for so intensively, for so many years, that I grew into my own distinctive style, I could really see the early influences of some of the fantasy novels I read as a child, for example.
And that led me to having an incredibly egotistical experience of going back as an adult with a long track record of publishing behind me and reading some of those early books that I loved so much that had helped to shape how I approached stories and fantasy and seeing them with fresh eyes and thinking, well, this isn't all that great, I could do better than this.
I don't want to name them, because that's just such an arrogant thing to think.
Kind of helped me contextualize that, and I.
It's. It's hard to describe that feeling, just a mingle of nostalgia and pride and satisfaction and disappointment.
And it's really driven home that I just want to do the best I can. I think it's natural and normal and healthy to absorb from as many influences as possible, and specifically not to absorb from only one or two influences, because that's stealing. If you steal from a lot of people simultaneously, then you're taking inspiration. I think that's where the line is drawn.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: Wonderful.
Many of your stories have very similar settings which fit into the genre of high fantasy with some science fiction elements. However, the tone of your stories are often very different from the epic fantasy of the gods are bastards to the dark comedy of only villains do that. And the romance of your current work horde, what makes you choose these different tones, and do you think that those tones change the genre of the stories?
[00:26:30] Speaker B: As I alluded to when talking about my creative process, this is one of the things that I don't think I exactly choose. It kind of happens to me. One thing I observe, looking back about tone in particular is that that is largely a reflection of what I'm feeling and what's going on in my life at the time of writing a specific work. And when I jump from one work to another that has a different tone, it has always been so far as a reaction to life events, to world events, and needing to shift my focus somewhere else to keep going. Because as much as I write, as much as I publish, and as big a part of my life as it is, it's kind of what I use to process the things I experience. So I started out writing the gods or bastards as an epic high fantasy with Sci-Fi elements because I was wanting to tell that story. I love high fantasy. I wanted to contribute my own.
And Horde is a dark come or not Horde, but only villains do that is a dark comedy because I was in a darker place and that was my means of addressing it. And it ended up being a dark comedy because honestly, I think that's the only way to go dark effectively. I mean, it just comes off as edgy if it's nothing but grimdark all the time. But if you're able to be a little tongue in cheek, I think the gritty parts actually hit harder.
And there was the progression of that to Horde is just because I was tired of the grimdark and frustrated and disappointed and angry with the world at large. And rather than wanting to process it actively like I did with only villains do that. By delving into the darkness, I veered hard in the other direction. And Horde is a story about romance and friendship and found family and people learning to get along and support each other because that's what I needed to work on to save my own sanity.
So I don't know if the tone changes the genre so much as inflects it. Like, you can do almost any tone in almost any genre. Like, I've done high fantasy of one kind or another from the very beginning. That's probably all I will ever, ever do. It's what I love the most, but it's always going to be a different kind of story because this is what I'm using to deal with whatever is happening.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: We've only got a few minutes left. Where can people find your work?
[00:29:06] Speaker B: I am available on royalroad.com. all of my currently published stories are there.
My display name is Web Anomicon, but if you search for any of my titles, Horde, that's h o a r d. Only villains do that or the gods are bastards. All of them will come up. You can click through my name and see what else I have. I have a few other minor stories on work as well.
[00:29:30] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much for your time.
[00:29:33] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed talking with you.
[00:29:37] Speaker A: And now this.
