After each cliffhanger death and betrayal in Game of Thrones, viewers must wait seven days until the next episode delivers resolution. As agonizing as that is, it's an eye-blink compared to the glacial pace of serial book publishing—something many an erstwhile George R.R. Martin fan knows.

Genre fiction, like TV, increasingly depends upon serialized long-arc storytelling; it's rare these days to see a science-fiction or fantasy novel that isn't part of a trilogy (or longer). Yet, the book world historically has been unable to match the comparatively rollicking pace of television.

But publishing company Farrar Straus and Giroux believes the TV model can lend momentum to a book series. In a move that takes as much from Victorian novels as from limited-run Netflix series, the publisher's FSG Originals imprint is experimenting with serialized fiction. After releasing Lian Hearn's fantasy novel Emperor of the Eight Islands in late April, FSG Originals will offer the three remaining books in her Tale of Shikanoko tetralogy—including Autumn Princess, Dragon Child, out today—before the end of September.

The Unbearable Longness of Reading

In recent years, we’ve seen episodic cliffhangers in all kinds of emergent formats: Serial, through audio; Making a Murderer, through instant Netflix release; The Atavist’s Mastermind, through online magazine installments. But even when a book imprint has committed to publishing a series, they stick to a strict schedule of one title per year. This can lead to lost momentum, especially for work with a complicated plot and cast of characters. With a drawn-out series, many readers wait until the end is in sight to start; the Tale of Shikanoko series strategy skirts that nicely. Hearn wrote it as one long novel with a four-part structure, which allows her readers to engage with it as one extended work.

This style of episodic fiction hearkens back to waiting in line for the next serial installment from Dickens or Tolstoy or Dumas. In the 19th century, readers developed ongoing relationships with characters in episodic novels, reading a new chapter in the exploits of Oliver Twist or Anna Karenina each month. Similarly, and unlike a typical fantasy release (like Hearn's own Tales of the Otori series, which was also published one per year), the rapid publication of the Shikanoko novels frames them as episodes of the same story. “It’s not an indefinite serial, eventually losing where it started from, which you do often see on TV,” says publisher Sean McDonald. “Hopefully, it feels like more of a single experience stretched out over a series of weeks.”

Hearn's saga isn't the first time FSG Originals has experimented with a binge-friendly schedule; in 2014, the imprint published the three volumes of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance) within an eight-month span. “It was a moment when people were experimenting in episodic storytelling on TV and Netflix, at the same time as a lot of frustration with the Game of Thrones novels not coming out,” says McDonald. “There was a shift going on in how people thought about consuming content.” Instead of losing steam by publishing one book in the series each year, he reasoned, he could sustain reader interest by publishing the sequels in quick succession. TV was experimenting with encouraging all-at-once consumption—why couldn’t books?

VanderMeer, who had only written one of the books, liked McDonald's idea; he rapidly wrote the two proposed sequels, and went on a whirlwind publicity tour to promote them all. The momentum-building tactic worked: The second and third books both made it onto The New York Times bestseller list, and each release led to a sales bump for previous volumes.

The benefits weren't just commercial. Since VanderMeer wrote the second and third books after agreeing to the unusual publication schedule, he could design the arc of the Southern Reach Trilogy with that method of reading in mind. “With distinct novels that all built to a central mystery by the end of the books, they really lent themselves to this schedule,” he says.

That's not the case with Hearn's Tale of Shikanoko series, which she wrote before agreeing to serialized publication. However, the fantasy tale could lend itself to episodic structure in a different way. “With many narrative peaks and switches of points of view between quite a large cast of characters, the episodic release gives time in between parts to process what has happened,” Hearn says. She hopes the release schedule will allow readers to have separate experiences with the different volumes, while staying familiar with the specifics of a complex world.

By fostering an ongoing relationship with a book series, McDonald is trying to keep readers engaged throughout its production schedule, as they would be with a TV show. And what better stories to start with than sci-fi and fantasy? “Both genres have histories of serialized publishing," McDonald says, "and with a story that develops across multiple volumes, it’s useful to have a core group of readers who are accustomed to waiting for the next book in a series." His hope is that it could work for other genres as well; after all, the original serialized novels were largely tales of family drama and historical adventure. First, though, the realm of fantasy will also be the realm of experimentation—and hopefully, George R.R. Martin will take the hint.