{Added a link back to this piece in the original post, as well as in the "tip jar" comment of the Daily Kos repost going live in a few minutes.}

Yes, what the pulps add to the Dime Novels, especially those based on repeated character developed out of the Story Papers, is the going concern that is both soliciting the lead story and adding content to the lead story.

Indeed, the existence of enough going concerns along those lines would thicken the market for freelance editing and copy-editing and illustration artists, which would in turn be to the benefit of those putting out the project at a kind book that Tobias Buckell describes in his extension to his original post.

As far as publication format ~ yes, the lead story at the head, and the additional content following, with the chapters in the ebook file content spine being appropriate distinct breaks of the lead story and then the additional content each as an additional chapter sounds about right. Full color cover illustration and additional story illustration as seems appropriate.

As far as not having the publication lurking around ~ there may be more of that than appears at first glance. There are those people who rather read on their ebook readers than fill them with content, who fill their devices with a batch of content and then look for more when its finished. There are library borrowed ebooks, where a 14 day return limit for a novela that takes one to four days to read generates some natural "lay around" time before the clock expires and its due back. There are people who rely on ebook readers to fill time they are away from WiFi, where having a short story's worth of time before getting back to WiFi may well not be unusual. Those are just off the top of my head from my own personal experience.

One issue I did not address except tangentially in the comments of the original piece is the social media structure, where a community website with multiple monthly and quarterly serials running would be one way to address one stress point, which is that the content generation pace for maintaining a "sticky" website is several ticks faster than the content generation pace for an effective ongoing serial. The type of sweat equity cooperative organization I described at the end of the piece would be much less likely to successfully launch if the attempt was to run it as a weekly.