Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42326
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Ways I've seen:

- The choose your own adventure option, where you give them a list of possibilities and tell them where they are.

- The Lord of The Rings option where you just sequence the endings and end the story over and over again.

- The Princess Bride option Galastel mentioned.

- The multiple epilogue option. This is basically like your multiple chapters, except they're called epilogues so the reader knows the story is basically over. They could each have a descriptive title so the reader understands they're options.

- You could direct the reader to a web page where you have different ending options on a menu. This option may be more technically difficult, but it's not hard, and you could then get some metrics of how popular each of the endings are, and even graph it over time. I mean, that doesn't show which ones people necessarily thought were written the best, but you get to see which ones people look at the most. It would probably also encourage online reviews and commentary that you really probably shouldn't search for because some people can be really abrasive. (I have seen this done, I just don't remember what books. I think one of them even had an option on the web page where they let people write their own, with a checkbox to say whether the submitted versions could be shared, and they then reviewed those submissions and released a few of them. But it was a long time ago and I don't remember what the book was.)

Original score: 4