The impossible task of writing fiction on Substack
And why you should do it anyway
Welcome to my little corner of the internet! I’m so glad you’re here. Below you’ll find my thoughts on the state of serialized fiction publishing on Substack.
Just interested in the fiction itself? I’ve got you covered:
Picture this:
You’ve written 30,000+ words of fiction. Some of them are good even!
You’d like to share those words with real, living people. Flesh-humans as my gramgram used to call them (she was not well). It would be nice to get paid for the words but that isn’t your main concern.
You find this great platform called Substack:
It lets you quickly create a page for your work.
It has a built in community.
You can’t customize much but that’s good because you’d spend more time fiddling with fonts and colors than actually writing.
You pick a fun name for your publication, something inviting with a hint of mystery. Something that evokes memories of a place that maybe never really existed but you wished it did. You take an artful selfie of yourself looking away from the camera to use as your profile pic. Everything is going great!
You decide to break your story into multiple parts. 30,000 words is WAY too many for a single sitting. That’s almost halfway to a real-ass novel. Two to three thousand words at a time is much more palatable. Plus if you use images sometimes people will get distracted and forget they’ve already read a bunch of words.
You release part one. The Substack gods (algorithm) gets you a few readers, plus you try to engage with the community which gets you a few more. You love your subscribers and they empower you to keep going. So you release more chapters.
Before you know it, you’re 7 or 8 chapters deep, but you aren’t gaining too many new subscribers. You try to ignore the analytics but they are always right there. With good and bad arrows and everything! Time to change your strategy.
You start promoting the first chapter a bit more, because the beginning is a great starting point for new readers to jump in! But then you realize that Substack isn’t really set up well for episodic fiction. You wished it worked more like a streaming service, with autoplay and stuff:
But that isn’t how Substack works. So you go back and edit your already existing posts to make it easier for new readers to follow. But sometimes you forget to do that because you are, regrettably, still a flesh-human.
Sometimes you promote new chapters, which feels a bit icky but hey you worked hard on this and how will anyone know unless you get the word out? You only have one sibling and he’s already subscribed! Then you start asking yourself why someone would read part 7 (or 9, or 45) of a story they know nothing about? You tend to not click on those links when others post them, so why would someone click on yours?
So you quit Substack, and you quit writing, and you quit the gym for good measure.
But only for like 30 minutes.
Then you double down.
“I’m going to write a novel. Maybe two!”
“I’m going to livestream myself brainstorming the creation of the novels. Surely people would enjoy watching me chew on a pencil while I stare off into space.”
“I will never look at the analytics again. I am an ARTIST.”
“It’s time to pivot to video.”
“Hey, maybe I’ll switch to another platform that was built for fiction!”
Live look at the other platform built for fiction:
So where do you go from here?
Well, you joined because you had stories inside of you that needed to be told before they burst from your chest, like one of those aliens from Aliens (Google censored the image results for this one so… if you know you know I guess).
So you keep telling those stories. And you keep interacting with the community. You decide it’s ok to experiment sometimes too. Maybe you will do some video posts. Maybe you’ll focus on single chapter stories. Those are fun to write. Maybe you’ll post that ridiculous story you wrote about the cereal mascots going to war with each other.
And maybe it’s ok if growth isn’t a straight line. And sometimes the words won’t flow as easily. And sometimes you’ll get sidetracked and read a 15,000 word profile of that dude who started Oculus and now makes drones for the military.
And maybe, sometimes, you look at the analytics.
You’re only a flesh-human after all.
Like what you see? Feel free to subscribe to get notified when something new pops out of my brain.
Already subscribed? Like, share, comment, and put on your sunglasses; you’re part of the cool kids club.
I have the same feelings, if it’s any consolation. Although new to Substack, I’m coming to view it primarily as an engagement and productivity tool. Engagement, as in what I’m doing right now — Hello, Daniel! — and productivity as in keeping me on track to produce content for repurposing in book form on Amazon KDP.
As for other serial fiction platforms, I’m only familiar with Kindle Vella, which hasn’t been successful for me. I’m told that those who already have a couple of novels available on Kindle do better.
Thanks for this Daniel. It feels good to know there are other writers struggling with this. I’ve focused on pretty much only publishing short stories for many of the challenges mentioned about serialized fiction. Sometimes it feels like the only people that would be interested in reading my stories are other Substack writers stuck in the same boat. We just trade views and take turns plugging holes in a sinking ship.