We should bring back this format. Just like Netflix's "dump all at once" strategy stifles the pop impact of their series, I think you could get more interest in literature by adopting a chapter-by-chapter release cycle. You would need to jumpstart it with some big name authors to draw interest, but I could see it taking off as a format once the ball starts rolling.
Problem with this is that you will get a lot of unfinished works. Sales would be checked regularly and as soon as unpopular chapter hits the market and sales go super low, it gets axed. Netflix itself does that too. Look at all the season 1/2 series out there. Imagine spending a year reading a novel just for it to be axed when it is 70% complete
short runs and one-offs are common in manga before someone gets approved for a full series
It never went away. This is the standard publishing format for fanfiction, webnovels, and so on.
true, but discoverability on the medium is awful right now, and there’s not really a pipeline for getting your webnovel an editor, and translating webnovel success into getting published
Why did you interpret being compared to a comic or manga as an insult to their quality?
In short, that wasn't my meaning. My line about the quality was in response to the first line of the comment I replied to, where it was said "Even worse, Charles Dickens mostly wrote serialized novels", which makes it seem as if that commenter thought serialized novels were considered of poorer quality than the alternative of publishing in a single volume. My remark about not being similar to a comic run is separate, and is due to how installment novels were not necessarily continual works in progress like a comic.
Other examples of serialized novels include The Count of Monte Cristo, Madame Bovary, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Joyce's Ulysses, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, and Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. A Farewell to Arms, for example, was completed entirely before it was serialized in Scribner's. In the heyday of the Atlantic and Scribner's magazines, many of the best American writers would first publish their novels in installments prior to releasing as a single volume. It was considered a mark of success to publish in installments in one of the vaunted literary magazines.