The time of the classics has passed, and while we read them to know where we came from as a literate culture, they are no longer commercial or marketable to the mainstream. I hope this is not true. My son @mvkean continues to urge me to read The Brothers Karamazov, a thousand+ pages of 19th Century prose, brilliant, timeless, relevant, though not an easy read. After hours of reading, my Kindle showed me I was all of 8 percent into the book. Oh my! Some of it seems to be skimmable or skippable (long dialogues about Church and State, e.g.). I can see the necessity of today's dictate to "cut to the chase" and "keep it succinct," but there is beauty in the classics and the ponderous tomes. I'm still trimming a 500+page novel down to 300 pages, and entire chapters, scenes, and characters have hit the cutting room floor. I'm not sure of the rightness of this pruning, but I keep pruning, all the same. And this market trick of putting the deleted material into a Book Two of a series: bah, humbug.
#SerialFiction, "published chapter by chapter, one installment per day, until the series is complete." I'm not patient with this sort of reading. At all. But it does sell, and it does have a historical precedent. It's how Henry James wrote "A Portrait of a Lady," a fact I can barely believe. Cliff-hanger chapter endings. Hooks. "But I have to see if she'll..."

You've got the market savvy to do this, and writers on tap with the talent to do it.

I love your explanation from that "grizzled old publisher from some ink-stained back alley print shop" about starting a chapter with dialogue and how a new generation of young writers questioned the reason.