Erfworld Thread X: A Series of Unfortunate Cliffhangers

[eschmenk]

I think that what you are complaining about is pretty typical among webcomics. To put things in context, some other successful webcomics don't do better job of splitting the story into books, although normally they don't retroactively split a book so late. One example is Girl Genius. Here is the last page of one book and here is the first page of the next book, which is also the current one. There is a scene change there, but no particular break in the action. Several books ago, the Foglios even retroactively adjusted a break by shifting a few pages from one book into the other and forcing a renumbering of pages in the latter book.

For several years, it seemed pretty obvious that the Foglios were attempting to split things so they could publish one book per year. The story arcs lasted much longer than that, so the breaks simply occurred throughout the arcs.

I know you like Unsounded. In that case, the break between the first and second books corresponded to the break between Chapters 3 and 4. The really wasn't much of a break in the story there, though. Chapter 3 ended with Sette and Duane avoiding a couple of Peaceguard. Chapter 4 began possibly the next morning with the Peaceguard locating were Sette and Duane had stayed the night and walking into a trap there. There wasn't anything at the beginning of Chapter 4 to set the context for that, although there was a flashback a couple of pages in. Still, a reader wouldn't want to start there. The next break was at the end of Chapter 6. Again, it corresponded to a change from one day to the next morning.

I'm wondering if Rob has thought much about how his page numbers will correspond to physical pages, though. I think his text updates would often require several physical pages to include all of the words.