How to fix Substack's fiction experience

A roadmap of features that would help fiction readers

Substack is great for writers. We’ve not had this level of freedom and control in our online writing for a long while. For readers of newsletters and non-fiction material, the experience is good across web, app and email.

I’m a writer of fiction, and that’s where Substack is currently more limited. There’s a lot more that could be done to give fiction readers a greatly enhanced experience.

Consider today’s post to be a shopping list of things I’d like to see Substack’s team implement to enhance the reading experience. Hopefully it’ll be useful - and please do leave your own suggestions down in the comments.

In no particular order, then:

More obvious previous/next CTAs

There’s an option in settings to turn on previous and next buttons for your Substack posts:

This works on a per-section basis, which is really useful for anyone writing a sequence of connected posts. These buttons display at the very bottom of posts and are quite subtle:

There are some usability tweaks that would enhance these buttons:

• Make them much more obvious! They’re quite hidden among the like/comment/restack buttons

• Have them also (optionally?) appear at the top, so that people can skip back to the previous post if they missed it

• Implement them as a special ‘Buttons’ element that authors can invoke at any point in the post’s main body. This would make it easy to add serial navigation wherever it makes most sense within the post. For example, I always have some author notes below my chapters, which means the previous/next buttons aren’t actually below the main chapter content - it’d be nice to be able to insert the previous/next buttons at that point.

Per-section ebook pagination

The Substack newsletter design is great for non-fiction, essays, how-tos and so on. Each post is a vertical scroll.

It would be amazing to have a per-section option to switch to an ebook/Kindle style pagination. This would present the posts as horizontal-scrolling pages, immediately transforming the reading experience into something more like reading a book. For an on-going serial, fiction or creative non-fiction, this would be a more compelling way to keep people reading.

They call it a page turner for a reason, right?

This wouldn’t work for all content, so I imagine it being a per-section thing. It might also be something that only works in the app - obviously it wouldn’t happen in email, and it might not make sense on web either. The app reading experience would be more like an ebook, and Substack suddenly becomes a Kindle competitor.

Swipe to next chapter

Continuing on from the previous point, it’d be great to have less friction between chapters. If a section was set up for horizontal pagination scrolling, reaching the end of a post should enable the reader to continue swiping to automatically go to the next chapter. Effortless serial reading.

There’s a potential complication here if authors include notes at the bottom of chapters (as I do). These could potentially be delineated so that they’re hidden from people reading on the app, unless they specifically choose to open the author notes - but I appreciate this starts to get a bit fiddly and complicated.

It would accommodate both types of readers, though: those who just want to read a book, and those who like to go behind-the-scenes and find out more.

Quick access index for serials

Something that is currently missing is an easy way to jump between chapters. Other online serial platforms like Wattpad and Royal Road make it very easy to hop around a book, much like how you can flick between pages in a print book, or jump to chapters in an ebook.

Here’s how it looks on Wattpad:

It’s simple, but it makes it much easier for a reader to visualise the book’s length, as well as find specific parts. Currently Substack fiction writers have to do this manually, which is awkward from a UX point of view. For example, I’ve made this index:

How to read Tales from the Triverse

It helps, but it requires the reader to manually navigate to that post. A quick index really needs to be a drop-down accessible from any post within a section.

Easier library access to specific Substacks

This is a more general Substack request rather than being specific to fiction. At the moment I can view my entire inbox or ‘Saved’ posts. Some extra filtering options would be very useful:

• A ‘paid’ filter to see posts from newsletters I pay to subscribe to (I could swear this used to exist, and then disappeared)

• A ‘favourites’ filter: I subscribe to over 100 Substacks, and I am occasionally interested in all of them, so don’t want to unsubscribe. Especially with the advent of Notes, this has become a big issue - if I could favourite the publications that I never want to miss, it’d make reading much easier

  • Specifically for serials, a reader being able to jump into a specific section of a publication, like they might choose to continue reading a book on a Kindle device, and be automatically returned to their previous reading position within that section would be huge

Ongoing full section audiobook auto-read

The automated post narration feature on Substack is amazing. It makes it possible to listen to newsletters on a commute or while you’re doing housework, even if the author hasn’t recorded a voiceover or podcast version.

For serials, this could be even better. Rather than having to click play on a per-post basis, it’d be amazing to be able to listen to an entire section. Hit play on a publication’s section and the app would read the entire thing, automatically going to the next chapter.

Automatic audiobook! Features mentioned earlier like having a proper chapter index would also help this be more easily navigable.

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I appreciate that these are not necessarily easy to implement. I also get that fiction writers/readers are not necessarily Substack’s priority right now - I imagine they make most of their money from non-fiction writers.

What I don’t want to do is come across here as a typical Telling You How To Do Your Job internet man. Hopefully these suggestions and ideas are useful as a kind of potential roadmap, and a way of better understanding what the (growing!) fiction community would like to see.

I’m sure I’ve missed stuff. You might disagree with some of my suggestions. If so, do jump into the comments! With luck Substack staff will stumble on this post, so having our thoughts handily collected in this one place will hopefully be useful.

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P.S. there’s a science fiction ebook giveaway going on at the moment which I’m taking part in. Head over here to grab some freebies.

Photo by Mark König on Unsplash