Serializing a Novel to Build a Readership

I'm considering taking one of the novels I'm about to finish (working on the final rewrites after feedback from an agent) and serializing it on my website. The goal would be to build up a readership so that subsequent novels will likely have a better chance of being picked up by a publisher and/or sold if I opt to self-publish them as ebooks. I plan to also offer it as an ebook that readers can purchase if they don't want to wait for the serialized parts.

Rather than the traditional chapter-per-week serialization that newspapers and magazines used to do, I plan on releasing one scene per day (weekdays, not sure if I'll release on weekends, too). This keeps the chunks of text short enough to comfortably read online, and will (hopefully) keep readers more involved. They won't be as likely to forget about the book if they only have to wait 24 hours rather than 7 days.

I'm also hoping that I could generate some decent sales of the ebook version this way (I'd also be promoting the ebook through other channels). I'm not holding out hope that this particular book will get any kind of publishing contract after doing this, but I'm hoping if the readership numbers and/or ebook sales are high enough, I can use that for leverage for subsequent books. And if the ebook sales are really high, I might forget about going the traditional route and just self-pub ebooks! Again, this is just to build up a readership and maybe some buzz. I'm not doing it for the money or in the hopes of landing some huge (or small) publishing contract.

Has anyone here done a serialized book or know of anyone who has? Any bewares or warnings? Success stories? Things to consider prior to doing this? Thanks!

My website is already getting a few thousand visitors a month (I've been writing about writing for awhile, and have traffic coming in from a variety of sources). I also have nearly a couple thousand Twitter followers, some of whom have already expressed an interest. I'm hoping that by releasing something like this, in a serialized format, that I can leverage the visitors and followers I already have to help promote it.

So I wouldn't be building from scratch. It would take around three months for the entire novel to be put up (at the 1 scene/day rate, though I haven't done a formal count yet, as I'm still adding in some scenes), which I think is long enough to build momentum, yet not long enough to get bogged down. And my plan is to put every post into the backend of my website and schedule them all at the start, so I won't have to worry about forgetting to post a new scene each day. All I'll need to do is moderate comments and promote it.

BenPanced said:

But if you put the entire novel online, would people buy the hardcopy version? They've read it online for free.

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No plans to try to get this one published in print (though obviously I'm not opposed to it, should someone want to publish it or should there be enough demand to consider self-pubbing). This would be in the hopes that if people like this one enough, they'd be happy to pay for my next one.