So the reader demo site is “live” and you can go read my novella, Family Feud there.
Hilariously, the story is chopped up into parts, chapters, and scenes, despite being so short. While those elements are usually reserved for (much) longer works, and this story could easily just be a collection of scenes, I wanted to showcase how Keely App displays a nested story hierarchy.
One of the reasons for that is because most online platforms for serialization have a “flat hierarchy” for stories. In Wattpad, for instance, you have “parts” and… that’s it. They are not even automatically numbered, so authors have to label the parts (“prologue,” “Chapter 1: The Start,” etc.). Most platforms follow this system, including Campfire, Ream, RoyalRoad, and others. Substack, which was never designed for long form fiction in the first place, is particularly egregious in that it does not even build an automatic table of contents for stories.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that kind of flat hierarchy, but most authors I know (and many readers!) prefer an organizational structure that, you know, makes sense. I wrestled a lot with file/folder structure on the back-end so that Keely App would be able to properly display nested story parts, and allow for easily traveled navigation via the nav/wiki pane.
Which meant that my very short novella (about 30k words) is now broken out to within an inch of its life into nested subsections!
If you have followed me for a long (long) time, you might have seen Family Feud before. It’s even been for sale on Amazon in the past. That’s because it’s my “test story”, the one I have used to experiment with software, platforms, and formats. I wrote it, hmmm… maybe in 2007? It is the story I used to hand-code my very first .epub file, back when there were not a lot of apps for formatting ebooks, and they were all quirky enough that doing it by hand was actually easier! To this day, whenever I need to test out new book formatting software, Family Feud gets dragged out of the archive.
The story lived as a genuine short story of about 10k words for a long time, but I rewrote it top to bottom specifically for Keely App.
Which is all to say, I know it’s not a great story. It is a neat idea and I like the characters, but “literature” it is not. It serves it’s purpose, though, and always has. I have a real soft spot for Family Feud, and sometimes ponder actually turning it into a good story, somehow.
Anyway, keep your expectations moderate if you actually read the thing.
But please DO marvel at the nested hierarchy!
