I currently use IngramSpark ever since they removed their "expensive" barrier to entry that required a one-time fee per upload. I can't remember what it was, $50(?) maybe. Anyhow, they've now made it even MORE of an incentive to self-publish with them, if I'm reading their latest feature correctly, because they are now making editing manuscripts unlimited AND free! From now through Jan 31st a code has to be used but starting February 1st, if you need to make a change to the manuscript it's FREE which is amazing! I think it used to be $20 per times you had to make a change to the final manuscript which can be costly every time you catch a typo! lol
Anyhow, I can vouch for their excellent print book quality. I have not used their hardcovers yet to confirm that, though I fully intend to this year.
That all sounds very good, I hadn’t heard about the upcoming changes. Those up-front costs (combined with ISBN costs) is why I initially went with Amazon KDP for No Adults Allowed.
What a fantastic post this is. And so damn useful for any new fiction writers who, let's face it, are not being helped as much as they could be by all these big tech platforms...
It's true, I've grown my newsletter considerably using social media, and usually with somewhat feelgood (or at least entertainingly surprising) stories. Now that Substack's Great Plateauing Of Free Signups is firmly upon us, I'll be leaning back into that a lot more this year.
In your case: I honestly think that everyone loves nerding out over the real science behind sci-fi stories, so if you were up for enthusiastically doing that stuff (I don't mean doing it lots, I mean doing it with obvious enthusiasm when you do it, because that seems to be one of the infectious positive elements that makes stuff get widely shared), and if you used that as a lead-magnet into free signups, I reckon that might work. It might work absolutely bonkersly*.
All that said - in terms of value for time spent, this may be a terrible deal for you, because it can be a ridiculous time-suck AND catapult you into a state of overcaffeinated anxiety about how AMAZINGLY RAGEFUL everyone in the world seems to be, which is the big drawback of using social media in 2026.
Well, there goes my plans for catching up on three years worth of writing in time for the final episode of Triverse! But I think I was being unreasonable in that expectation anyway. Say more about the PaperPro, totally optional, thing. I’ve looked at it a time or two and decided against it. Like TK, I hand write everything but then I have to transcribe it which is a pain (but also a bit of an editing step).
Also, Scrivener has been an absolutely lifesaver for my series, which will finish sometime next year. I decided to go boring chronological (mostly) for the serial instead of that other idea I floated around (although I may still do indexes for it, for giggles) and without Scrivener’s metadata and outline view I’d be going even more mental than I usually am.
Ha, it just means you’ll be able to think about getting a nice ebook or paperback, which will be MUCH nicer than having to click through endless archival posts. :)
The Paper Pro was a big risk, because it is definitely not cheap. I was very nervous getting it, even though I’d thought about it for a long while. I’d always thought that I’d like it as a device, but couldn’t justify the price. When that became viable (at a stretch!) I gave it a go.
The tipping point was in seeing it as a professional tool, rather than a personal gadget. It was a business expense, basically! I was hoping it would actively help my writing, which in the last year-or-two has become more of an important financial thing for me.
Anyway - it’s great! Fun to sketch on (although the drawing is very, very basic compared to, say, Procreate on an Ipad - best for simple sketches and annotations, or initial layouts before moving to a more capable drawing environment), brilliant for taking notes, and I got the version with a keyboard so I can use it like a normal laptop for writing actual chapters.
A nice touch is that you can draw on and annotate your writing, and swap in and out of handwriting/typed text (great for editing). You can draw on PDFs as well, which is brilliant for research.
The Paper Pro has a colour display, so I’ve used it a lot for reading digital comics. Not as vibrant as a backlit laptop display,. though - it’s more like reading from a floppy comic paper stock.
Anyway, it’s great. But it is still very expensive! So it really depends on how much use you think you’ll get out of it. I use mine every day, so it’s been a good investment so far.
True, the collected ebook/paperback edition will take a while to appear as it'll be revised to some degree. Probably quite a lot.
And yes - an iPad can do more. Weirdly, the limited functionality is a feature for me of the Paper Pro - but like I say, it's totally a luxury and in many ways very silly thing.
I have fallen in love with Scrivener recently! By the way, if someone is short of cash, they can install the older version of Scrivener for free. My Macbook is so old that that’s what I had to do and it’s good enough!
"I am continuing to read The Hobbit with my son. Neither of us have read it before. It is good. More hot takes to come."
I have just realized I was falsely under the impression that everyone British is somehow mistakenly expected to have read "The Hobbit" or LOTR by virtue of their Britishness. It's a pretty great book for kids, and this guide had some thoughtful and interesting suggestions I've never heard of. Thank you for the directional point to Affinity. Am excited to check that puppy out.
The buckets of pacing metaphor is something I wish I'd had when I was structuring my own serial. I just launched a found-document mystery on Substack — the story is told entirely through logs, transcripts, and records left behind by a vanished lighthouse keeper — and figuring out how to pace reveals across episodes when readers control their own reading speed has been one of the hardest craft problems I've faced. Your point about the Triverse continuity issue and turning to the physics community for help resonated too. There's something specific to long-form serial work where the world gets big enough that you can't hold it all in your head anymore. 330,000 words is staggering. Congratulations on nearing the finish — I can only imagine what it feels like to close out a project that large after four years of living inside it.
I really don’t think I could write serials on this scale without using a tool like Scrivener. As you say, at some point you simply hit a threshold of ‘too much information’, so being able to quickly cross-reference and check notes is vital. That’s all possible without something like Scrivener, of course, but I doubt I’d be able to do it at the speed required for a weekly serial!
Congratulations on finishing Triverse — four years of consistent weekly chapters is a masterclass in discipline. I'm serializing my own work (epistolary thriller with unreliable narration) and your point about maintaining a 6-10 chapter buffer has been crucial. Curious: how did you handle continuity tracking across 60+ stories?
I've used Scrivener for over a decade and I can't imagine using anything else to write, especially serial fiction. Being able to color code sections, move them around and place thoughts on the cork board are unequalled in my experience. Thanks for sharing all of your tricks and tools. Always good to get another perspective. Would like to invite you to an informal group called The Serial Table. Your experience would be great for others to hear. https://open.substack.com/pub/theserialtable/p/coming-soon?r=78zlwx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I randomly fell into the arms of scrivener in 2020 and have never turned back. I was formally trained as a screenwriter so I have a whole system on how I plot three act structure using scrivener. It took me from my first YA mystery romance novel “Twisted” the way to my current memoir. I can’t recommend it enough. I especially recommend using the metadata to help you track things in your document. I was able to come up with all kinds of little trackers for characters, themes, plot elements, and see how frequently or infrequently they appeared in “Twisted”. You can really go in on it—just make sure it doesn’t distract you from actual you know, writing, hahha.
I’m stoked to check out the combo of ingramspark and bookshop and book funnel. These are the tools I was relatively clueless about before coming on substack! Once again Simon, you are so helpful.
Appreciate the advice! This answered a lot of questions for me, and we have a lot of overlap with the tools we use. Scrivener and Canva are both fantastic and I'm a big fan of the Remarkable for brainstorming. I have an older one in black and white, but a full color + backlit screen sounds really nice.
Another solid one. Thanks, Simon! On the writing tools, Scrivener is great and I have it but being a Mac user I have found that I use Ulysses almost exclusively for my writing. Both are great but Ulysses for me is a little easier to use and keeps me focused on the writing. But with that said a number of my friends use Scrivener as their go to writing tool.
That's a good provocation! That does indeed sound like it might be useful. That said, part of the job of a serial writer is to handle that sort of thing. But, yes, an AI that could spot a plot hole and flag it would be helpful. Caveat being that I wouldn't want to be feeding my manuscript into an AI run by a large tech firm. It would need to be locally hosted and run, with strict guardrails.
I currently use IngramSpark ever since they removed their "expensive" barrier to entry that required a one-time fee per upload. I can't remember what it was, $50(?) maybe. Anyhow, they've now made it even MORE of an incentive to self-publish with them, if I'm reading their latest feature correctly, because they are now making editing manuscripts unlimited AND free! From now through Jan 31st a code has to be used but starting February 1st, if you need to make a change to the manuscript it's FREE which is amazing! I think it used to be $20 per times you had to make a change to the final manuscript which can be costly every time you catch a typo! lol
Anyhow, I can vouch for their excellent print book quality. I have not used their hardcovers yet to confirm that, though I fully intend to this year.
That all sounds very good, I hadn’t heard about the upcoming changes. Those up-front costs (combined with ISBN costs) is why I initially went with Amazon KDP for No Adults Allowed.
This is super appealing thank you for sharing this tip!
What a fantastic post this is. And so damn useful for any new fiction writers who, let's face it, are not being helped as much as they could be by all these big tech platforms...
It's true, I've grown my newsletter considerably using social media, and usually with somewhat feelgood (or at least entertainingly surprising) stories. Now that Substack's Great Plateauing Of Free Signups is firmly upon us, I'll be leaning back into that a lot more this year.
In your case: I honestly think that everyone loves nerding out over the real science behind sci-fi stories, so if you were up for enthusiastically doing that stuff (I don't mean doing it lots, I mean doing it with obvious enthusiasm when you do it, because that seems to be one of the infectious positive elements that makes stuff get widely shared), and if you used that as a lead-magnet into free signups, I reckon that might work. It might work absolutely bonkersly*.
All that said - in terms of value for time spent, this may be a terrible deal for you, because it can be a ridiculous time-suck AND catapult you into a state of overcaffeinated anxiety about how AMAZINGLY RAGEFUL everyone in the world seems to be, which is the big drawback of using social media in 2026.
*Not a word.
Well, there goes my plans for catching up on three years worth of writing in time for the final episode of Triverse! But I think I was being unreasonable in that expectation anyway. Say more about the PaperPro, totally optional, thing. I’ve looked at it a time or two and decided against it. Like TK, I hand write everything but then I have to transcribe it which is a pain (but also a bit of an editing step).
Also, Scrivener has been an absolutely lifesaver for my series, which will finish sometime next year. I decided to go boring chronological (mostly) for the serial instead of that other idea I floated around (although I may still do indexes for it, for giggles) and without Scrivener’s metadata and outline view I’d be going even more mental than I usually am.
Ha, it just means you’ll be able to think about getting a nice ebook or paperback, which will be MUCH nicer than having to click through endless archival posts. :)
The Paper Pro was a big risk, because it is definitely not cheap. I was very nervous getting it, even though I’d thought about it for a long while. I’d always thought that I’d like it as a device, but couldn’t justify the price. When that became viable (at a stretch!) I gave it a go.
The tipping point was in seeing it as a professional tool, rather than a personal gadget. It was a business expense, basically! I was hoping it would actively help my writing, which in the last year-or-two has become more of an important financial thing for me.
Anyway - it’s great! Fun to sketch on (although the drawing is very, very basic compared to, say, Procreate on an Ipad - best for simple sketches and annotations, or initial layouts before moving to a more capable drawing environment), brilliant for taking notes, and I got the version with a keyboard so I can use it like a normal laptop for writing actual chapters.
A nice touch is that you can draw on and annotate your writing, and swap in and out of handwriting/typed text (great for editing). You can draw on PDFs as well, which is brilliant for research.
The Paper Pro has a colour display, so I’ve used it a lot for reading digital comics. Not as vibrant as a backlit laptop display,. though - it’s more like reading from a floppy comic paper stock.
Anyway, it’s great. But it is still very expensive! So it really depends on how much use you think you’ll get out of it. I use mine every day, so it’s been a good investment so far.
Except you’ll be editing it, right? But yes, looking forward to potentially a series of Triverse books? Anthologies?
Not sure I could justify it, as it does everything my aging iPad Pro can do, and not quite that (I do dabble in Procreate on occasion).
True, the collected ebook/paperback edition will take a while to appear as it'll be revised to some degree. Probably quite a lot.
And yes - an iPad can do more. Weirdly, the limited functionality is a feature for me of the Paper Pro - but like I say, it's totally a luxury and in many ways very silly thing.
Thank you for this advice.
I have fallen in love with Scrivener recently! By the way, if someone is short of cash, they can install the older version of Scrivener for free. My Macbook is so old that that’s what I had to do and it’s good enough!
Nice tip!
"I am continuing to read The Hobbit with my son. Neither of us have read it before. It is good. More hot takes to come."
I have just realized I was falsely under the impression that everyone British is somehow mistakenly expected to have read "The Hobbit" or LOTR by virtue of their Britishness. It's a pretty great book for kids, and this guide had some thoughtful and interesting suggestions I've never heard of. Thank you for the directional point to Affinity. Am excited to check that puppy out.
I am feeling slightly more British with each chapter we read.
Very helpful information. Thanks for sharing it.
Thanks Simon! Scrivener's binder + cross-reference system is a lifesaver.
The buckets of pacing metaphor is something I wish I'd had when I was structuring my own serial. I just launched a found-document mystery on Substack — the story is told entirely through logs, transcripts, and records left behind by a vanished lighthouse keeper — and figuring out how to pace reveals across episodes when readers control their own reading speed has been one of the hardest craft problems I've faced. Your point about the Triverse continuity issue and turning to the physics community for help resonated too. There's something specific to long-form serial work where the world gets big enough that you can't hold it all in your head anymore. 330,000 words is staggering. Congratulations on nearing the finish — I can only imagine what it feels like to close out a project that large after four years of living inside it.
I really don’t think I could write serials on this scale without using a tool like Scrivener. As you say, at some point you simply hit a threshold of ‘too much information’, so being able to quickly cross-reference and check notes is vital. That’s all possible without something like Scrivener, of course, but I doubt I’d be able to do it at the speed required for a weekly serial!
Congratulations on finishing Triverse — four years of consistent weekly chapters is a masterclass in discipline. I'm serializing my own work (epistolary thriller with unreliable narration) and your point about maintaining a 6-10 chapter buffer has been crucial. Curious: how did you handle continuity tracking across 60+ stories?
I've used Scrivener for over a decade and I can't imagine using anything else to write, especially serial fiction. Being able to color code sections, move them around and place thoughts on the cork board are unequalled in my experience. Thanks for sharing all of your tricks and tools. Always good to get another perspective. Would like to invite you to an informal group called The Serial Table. Your experience would be great for others to hear. https://open.substack.com/pub/theserialtable/p/coming-soon?r=78zlwx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Thanks, Edward, I’ll take a look.
Thanks for sharing! As a newbie, this is very helpful
I randomly fell into the arms of scrivener in 2020 and have never turned back. I was formally trained as a screenwriter so I have a whole system on how I plot three act structure using scrivener. It took me from my first YA mystery romance novel “Twisted” the way to my current memoir. I can’t recommend it enough. I especially recommend using the metadata to help you track things in your document. I was able to come up with all kinds of little trackers for characters, themes, plot elements, and see how frequently or infrequently they appeared in “Twisted”. You can really go in on it—just make sure it doesn’t distract you from actual you know, writing, hahha.
I’m stoked to check out the combo of ingramspark and bookshop and book funnel. These are the tools I was relatively clueless about before coming on substack! Once again Simon, you are so helpful.
Appreciate the advice! This answered a lot of questions for me, and we have a lot of overlap with the tools we use. Scrivener and Canva are both fantastic and I'm a big fan of the Remarkable for brainstorming. I have an older one in black and white, but a full color + backlit screen sounds really nice.
Another solid one. Thanks, Simon! On the writing tools, Scrivener is great and I have it but being a Mac user I have found that I use Ulysses almost exclusively for my writing. Both are great but Ulysses for me is a little easier to use and keeps me focused on the writing. But with that said a number of my friends use Scrivener as their go to writing tool.
You could also try https://bookvault.app for printing books on demand. Scrivener had a webinar about it on Monday – the follow up email said: "The webinar replays will be available for a limited time at https://www.literatureandlatte.com/library".
I agree, Scrivener is a wonderful tool, worth its weight in gold.
This article comes at a perfect time. What if AI tools could proactively flag plot inconsistencies acrros multiple serial arcs?
That's a good provocation! That does indeed sound like it might be useful. That said, part of the job of a serial writer is to handle that sort of thing. But, yes, an AI that could spot a plot hole and flag it would be helpful. Caveat being that I wouldn't want to be feeding my manuscript into an AI run by a large tech firm. It would need to be locally hosted and run, with strict guardrails.