Webnovel or No?

I have a bit of a dilemma. You see, I want to do a webnovel, but I also don’t want to just give away my ideas for free. There are novels that I am working on, one series in particular, that I plan on sending to agents and publishing houses, but I have other ideas that may even work better as serials. Unfortunately, many magazines I have seen don’t publish serials, so the only real way to get a serial published is to do it on the internet, when you control the publishing of it.

So, the question is if there is a purpose for any kind of free content, and if there is any reason it may be a good idea. Personally, I’m okay with one of my stories being produced for free, but I’ve tried that before and ended up with a crappy story, because honestly, it was, and I ran out of ideas because I hadn’t written before putting any of it up.

If I do put a serial online, I plan on writing all or most of the story before I do. Even then, there will be other things that I put up with it. It can’t just be simply posting the story and hoping people will read it. If that’s the case, it needs to be the best darn story that it could possibly be, and that’s not the best thing to count on.

Now, I’m not saying I won’t be trying to make it the best darn story it can possibly be, but with the tools I have at my disposal, there are more things I can do. First of all, I need to make sure that the page I post it on is interesting, not just a simple background offered by whatever blog I use. I need to make sure it’s designed so that people want to actually look at the computer screen long enough to read it. Second, I need to get people to actually want to pay for it. Unfortunately, even if it is the best story people have read, they won’t want to pay for it if they can just go on the website and read it.

My idea is to publish the story and then offer print-on-demand publishing for books in what’s becoming more commonly known as “dead-tree format”. Now, I realize that a lot of people still wouldn’t pay for a book if the story is online, but still, it’s better than nothing.

This wouldn’t be a way to actually get a lot of income, but more for the personal satisfaction of publishing a story and possibly, maybe getting a few dollars from it. I would still write my main projects and send them to major publishers to try to get them into bookstores.

Any ideas on how to make a webnovel work?