Starting in 2014, novelist Mark Z. Danielewski will serialize a 27-volume novel project. Once the experiment begins, installments of The Familiar will come out every three months.

According to the New York Times, Danielewski (pictured, via) signed a $1 million book deal with Knopf Doubleday’s Pantheon Books for the first ten parts of his serialized novel. His editor Edward Kastenmeier told the newspaper: “You await the next one; you want to talk about it … Everybody will be engaging in the book in roughly the same cycle.”

Last night, Publishers Marketplace news editor Sarah Weinman reminded us that Danielewski serialized his debut novel (House of Leaves) on iUniverse back in 1999. Follow this link to see the vintage web page for the serialization. At the time, Pantheon called it “the first complete on-line serialization of a literary work of such magnitude by a major trade publisher prior to publication.”