Maintaining readers over time with serialized fiction?
I am one of several authors on a fairly new shared blog. The blog has a mix of serialized and one-shot posts. Because it's a new blog (2.5 months, ~30 posts so far), there is quite a variety of posts and authors (though all on the broader theme for the blog) and we're not yet at the point where authors or topics can be assigned regular slots (e.g. "Tuesday is Monica's fiction" or whatever).
I am posting a serialized work of fiction, one chapter at a time. I get positive feedback anecdotally, but I can't help noticing in the stats that views are dropping off a bit with each chapter. (There have been four, thus far.) It's possible, of course, that people just aren't into my story, but since I'm also getting that positive feedback, I think I might be doing something else wrong.
Each post has previous/next links for the adjacent chapters. The blog platform quotes the first paragraph (or portion of it) on the front page, so I've been leading with the new material rather than repeating the end of the previous chapter (a trick I've seen another author use). I've just created a "the story so far" post that I'll maintain and start linking with the next chapter on the theory that this might help.
Serialized fiction is hardly new, so this shouldn't be a new problem. Given the constraints I've described here, what else can or should I do to maintain an audience as my story unfolds over time?
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