Five things I learned serialising a novel on substack
1. Not many people read serialised novels on substack...
Last month I finished serialising the third draft of a young adult fantasy novel here on this substack. Here are the things I learned from this experience:
Not many people read serialised novels on substack.
I haven’t had very many readers or views. This makes sense as I’ve basically done zero promotion of my serial except for posting it on my social media, which also gets very few views (unless you pay to boost the posts, which I refuse to do).
But looking around, this seems to be true of other substacks too. The platform isn’t built for serial fiction and doesn’t have an established base of people looking for that on it (like for e.g. Wattpad, RoyalRoad or Kindle Vella) and it seems from reading other people’s substack newsletters that unless you are already a famous author it is very hard to get people to read your fiction on substack.
Even Elle Griffin, an extremely successful substack writer, appears to make money and garner views from her non-fiction posts about the publishing industry, and gives her fiction away for free.
The people who do read my work enjoy it.
That said, the people who have read my work have enjoyed it. This includes close friends and family, but also some complete random strangers on the internet, which is naturally what encourages me the most! You can see some of their reviews here (NB some of these reviews come from places other than substack where I posted the novel, where it got more reads!)
To get more people to read your serliased fiction on substack, you need to promote and market it (duh).
Again, from looking around at other subtasks, unless you are already a famous author it seems the way to get more readers is to self-promote your work in certain places. A pity then that I absolutely hate doing this and have a strong instinctual aversion to it.
The best strategy that I can see so far for doing this, as well as networking with other writers on substack, is to use the increasingly tried-and-tested methods of indie author self-promotion and marketing which include using sites like BookFunnel and StoryOrigin to participate in indie author e-newsletter cross-promotions.
For example, I think it’s genius of Simon K Jones and Rachael Dunn that they use their substacks as their own indie newsletters and therefore include cross-promotions in them. I may switch from MailChimp to doing this at some point, because it’s easier to create newsletters in substack.
Releasing a 1000-2000 word chapter once per week is better than releasing a 4000-8000 word chapter once per month.
Whoops. This is something that is backed up by the received wisdom on Wattpad, RoyalRoad and (to mention him again) Simon K Jones’s serial fiction writing guide. It makes sense though. It’s easier to read a smaller chapter, especially when on a device, and the more frequent the releases the more someone gets hooked.
In the future, I may switch from larger monthly chapters to releasing a 1000-2000 word chapter per week, though I may do this on a platform other than substack where it is likely to get more reads. I may however keep up the larger monthly chapters and the podcast on substack because…
People like podcasts!
This has been the big pleasant surprise of my substack experiment. Where I’ve had relatively few reads of my posted prose, I’ve had comparatively loads of listens to the podcast of me reading out my story, and even a few 5 star ratings on iTunes, again with zero promotion or marketing!
I guess people like free audiobooks which release episodically! That makes sense too.
(It also probably helps that I got listed in the audiobook directory of reddit/progressionfantasy )
So, if I can find time I will catch up and then keep up this podcast. If I do, I will keep it under a pseudonym, however, since I am only reading a (third or so) draft of the story after all.
Those are my insights. Do you write your own serialised fiction and post it online? If so, what are your thoughts / own insights?