Zoe (21) to release serialised novel over next 12 weeks
A YOUNG Kerry author, Zoe O’Connor, is very much keeping it ‘old-school’ with the release of her debut novel, but Zoe – a third-year English student in Trinity College, Dublin – hopes that her way of doing it will grab readers’ attention.
Her novel is called ‘Duplicity’, and instead of releasing the book all at once, Zoe has instead decided to go down the route of the ‘serialised novel’ and will instead be releasing a new chapter – of which there are 12 – every week.
Speaking to about why she decided to go down this different publishing route, Zoe said that it is a sort of throwback to how things were done in the 18th Century.
Indeed, some of world’s most successful novels were originally published in instalments in periodical magazines, including Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle), Great Expectations (Dickens), The Three Musketeers (Dumas), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Madame Bovary (Flaubert) and many more.
“I studied that kind of format in college. We were looking back to Victorian times when it was huge and when Charles Dickens started doing it. Every week or every month, depending on the serial, there would be another chapter of these books that went on to be huge later on,” said Zoe.
“I just thought that every week, these stories were formed by their readers, and when you read it and because you have to wait another week to read the next one, you spend more time thinking about the characters and guessing about what’s going to happen next.
“I think that in media, particularly today, that feeling has been lost, especially like when, say, Netflix brings something out, it’s all available to you straight away on demand. So, with my story, I thought it’d be cool to bring back that older format and hopefully bring back that anticipation,” Zoe continued. ‘Duplicity’, Zoe tells us, is a story that will, over the course of 12 weeks, tell the cautionary tale of a modern dating dystopia.
“I wrote it like a sort of an insight into modern dating but taking in that aspect, and I just took some of my own stories and my experiences and that of my friends about the perilous world of dating, especially in Dublin, and it all just came together for the story,” she said.
This is Zoe’s first serialised story, although she has been writing for both her own blog and online media since her early teens. Notably she won an Award for her blog – at the .eu awards in Brussels in 2016.
The first chapter is free and was released last Friday, with the second chapter available to read now also.
After that, each additional chapter will be released every Friday, with all 12 chapters of Duplicity available to be purchased for €9.99 on www. the-dots.eu. If you buy all 12 chapters, you will be emailed a link to the latest chapter every Friday.