I have one to add. Unless I am missing someting stories appear in the order they were posted based on date. I am doing a serial. This means the newest episode is at the top of the list. This is fine for regular postings.
I have a section specifically for my Series and this approach does not work here. I would like the ability to arrange Stories in a specific sequence so readers can easily see episodes in my series in the proper order which is not publish date.
I if am missing someting here, please let me know.
So pinning the first chapter is a great trick, but I get the sense that it's not just about highlighting the first one. That it's more about re-ordering your content so that it's in story order rather than posting order?
If so, I only see two options.
First, you can do what Simon mentioned above and create an index page listing the entries in the preferred reading order.
Second, you can cheat and change the "publication date" of your posts. Since they get listed in reverse chronological order, if you change the date of post B so that it appears to have been released before post A, it will get listed before A (well, under A, since it's in reverse).
You get the idea.
To change the date, BTW, just go to the settings of a published post and scroll down to the bottom. You can edit it from there.
It's not an ideal solution, but it'll do the trick.
Feels more like a hack than a fix, and if they ever do implement a proper solution it'd be a right pain to have to go back and re-edit the post dates into something useful. :D
True, but that's assuming you'd care about preserving the original dates. I would, personally, but others might not, which is why I mentioned this option. If it were me, though, I'd probably just go with an index.
Thanks Alex, that is what I am doing. It is doubtful that they will implement this, the real Use Case for substack is publishing individual articles and for that, dates make sense. It is was helpful just to validate what I thought was true.
Substack is still set up on the assumption that people are writing 'news' of some sort. And that the latest is the most important, and that you can pretty much jump onto a newsletter whenever you want. That's not how an ongoing story works, though, of course.
If Substack created a new "books" section type, this would help achieve some of what you're after and would be beneficial to poets, non-fiction writers, illustrators etc.
I really like the multimedia aspects of Substack - adding images, audio and the like. If these were paired with more traditional book layouts, it'd be amazing
Yeah! The real trick is expanding to do all these things without the platform disintegrating, or becoming too diffuse and confusing the readership. It's going to be a hard one to get right for the Substack team.
There are some really great ideas compiled into this post and it should be rich territory for the Substack product team to mine. My current frustration with the platform is actually not a new feature, but making a fundamental one work properly: Search! Try doing a search for "the memory of my shadow" and see if a single one of the 20 episodes of my novel that contain that very phrase in the title come up. I get the need to make the algorithm prioritize authors with bigger followings, but when an exact phrase does not show results, it feels wrong. Not sure if they're just not indexing any posts by authors with less than thousands of subscribers or what but search should be more of a level playing field for discovery.
Yep, good point. Searching for the title of my current serial 'Tales from the Triverse' gets zero results. It's not the name of my publication, but it's littered through loads of my posts. But it doesn't show up. Just a ton of weird American political stuff (which I'm guessing is actually the majority of Substacks - I just don't see any of that stuff normally).
You'd think having a weird word like 'triverse' in my title would make it easy for it to show up in search.
You've listed out all the things I wish Substack has! I've moved my stories to another site (fictionate.me) because its system suits a fiction writer. Writers can set their book as free for readers, 'pay-per-book' model, or monthly subscription. The 'pay-per-book' is what I was looking for. Readers pay for the book (even if it is in progress) and will have access to all chapters, including ones that the writer will add in the future. You can also have your book available as an audiobook, too. The site uses an AI to read your book. Now, if Substack has something like this, then I'll also definitely move my work here too.
Interesting no one replied to this comment. I'm new to Substack. Maybe everyone is still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? if that is what is going on here?
It's a tricky puzzle. Some other platforms are more naturally suited to 'books' or even serialised fiction more generally, but they don't tend to have the reach, networking effects or ease-of-use of Substack. And they often are closed systems requiring registration for readers which don't share subscriber lists.
There's nothing perfect, basically. :) The benefits of Substack outweigh its slight awkwardness for fiction, so far, though.
It would also be worth it, if the fiction section also had fiction and only fiction in it. I browsed through it the other day and it took me three pages to get get to some fiction to read.
Interesting point. I have specific sections for fiction, but I also publish the non-fiction stuff (like this post). However, in the 'fiction' section it'll just show my publication....which might not be what someone is after if they're wanting to actually READ some fiction, rather than read ABOUT fiction.
I hadn't thought about that angle, TBH, and it's a really good point. Being able to separate 'the discussion of fiction' from 'fiction stories to read' would be useful.
Great suggestions. But I think Substack is just eventually going to come out with its own online publishing service and publishing software suite that's integrated with the larger blogging apparatus that will make these ideas moot.
Do you mean an entirely separate platform dedicated to fiction that is loosely connected to the original Substack blogging platform and has all the fiction bells and whistles that Simon talks about here built in at the core level so we end up with the best of both worlds?
If so, then yes, I believe that would be the most elegant solution.
These are all really great suggestions. As I publish more and more fiction to Substack, I agree that these changes would make the experience a lot better for readers. I use Substack as my main way of connecting with readers and making it as frictionless as possible would be tremendous. That said, there are a lot of really great aspects to this platform.
Great post - one thing I would add is that maybe what they have is a particular kind of section that is set up to be a book. There they could include your request list and the one that I would add is the ability to have a cover image specific to the section that is more like a book cover. It might also be nice in this new "book section" idea to have a place for actual chapters and then for additional materials like author notes, polls, extra material (like bonus scenes/novellas)--almost like a home base for the book (not sure how to deal with multiple book series).
The risk I think, with any of these requests, is ending up with too many edge cases. If they try to please us book writers, and poets, and musicians, and filmmakers, on top of what they already do, it could all start to get a bit messy. You could also end up with some really ugly publications that are using the options poorly. One of the benefits of being a Substack reader at the moment is that you're guaranteed a certain level of professional delivery and appearance (aside from the writing quality).
Yeah I can understand that. It seems like a section that can have sections isn’t too much. But I also like not having to maintain a website and newsletter so can fully appreciate what Substack brings to the table.
I personally don't feel the need for horizontal pagination or quick swiping between chapters, but a better index and more obvious next post buttons would definitely be nice, save me a lot of trouble. I also don't think bits like author commentary need such a complex solution, you can just scroll past them.
Edit: Would like to add that I also hope the substack team comes across this post.
Substack has a built-in serial index if you put your serials in Sections (the Section index.) But it is newest to oldest order. I wish readers could toggle between newest to oldest and oldest to newest. That can't be that hard to code. Right now I pin Chapter One to the top of the Section index, but it not ideal. And the section index is not very compact. It require a lot of scrolling if your serial is long.
A Chapter One button at the top of each chapter in case someone opens a newer chapter and wants to start at the beginning would be nice.
For those who don't realize they can click on the section title and get to the section index, the pop-up index idea would work and be a nice compact alternative. If it was obvious to readers how to access it.
A nav bar that has previous | index | next buttons, with the 'index' opening the drop-down list, would work quite nicely. That could either be a default elements for sections marked as being serials, or something that authors can insert from the 'More' menu.
But keep in mind, the Previous and Next buttons only work if you have published your chapters in chronological order. I fumbled once, and injected a chapter in-between later, and this causes these buttons to move to the next published post, than the next chapter. Technically they are Previous Post and Next Post buttons, so if your serialised novel has non-chapter posts in-between, you’d have to wade through those as well.
And yes, I’ve been harping about how much more writer-friendly Substack is, as opposed to reader-friendly. There’s no way to track what posts and publication I’m currently reading, so I end up having to open them all as tabs. I currently have four Brave windows, each with dozens of tabs open. I’ve love to have a “currently-reading” section, with neat progress indicators or something similar.
In any case, Substack is a fairly nascent platform, and I’m not too worried, these features tend to get added over time. In the meanwhile, we just gotta keep doing our own hacks to navigate Substack’s quirks.
Always remember you can edit the date and time of any published post so if you ever posted something and it’s not in the order you want, you can fix that. Or move that post out of the section it’s in if it’s in the way.
I also made a table of contents post for my novella, to help organise things, but it means also linking it in every post and updating it, etc.
I've seen a few people put hyperlinks (on numbers or numerals) as a horizontal across the very top of a post, which can work well, but also requires a lot of tweaking and ongoing updating as each post is published as you then have to update all back-entries.
What's a CTA?
I do really like the notion of having author commentary-type sections as toggleable on or off. Could be as simple as a paywall threshold setting when writing a post, so that it's only viewable if a reader has that setting on.
I'll add to this if anything comes to mind that I feel you haven't mentioned, but seems like you covered all the bases here.
Yeah I have some stuff coming out that I'd like to include in my custom 'nav bar' for my serial, but backporting it to all of the already written chapters would be a real pain. I have a template document I use to make stuff like that simpler in general.
i've been watching for these features for the whole last year as I get ready to move from nonfiction to Substack serial fiction. Has they really been no progress in the last year? did you do a follow up post? Also, excuse me if someone answered this, but what the hell is the real function of tags. Do they provide an interior index? I've already started a separate table of contents page that people can go to, but it just isn't as seamless as the other platforms. other things mentioned have also been in the back of my mind. I even asked them once about rearranging post on drafts so it'll be easier to publish them in order even alphabetically or by number would help if you can't dothem manually. Anyway, I love the platform, but these things really make it difficult Thanks for any insights!
I love the sound of all of these!! I write fiction (alongside non-fiction) on my Substack, and I would love for it to be easier for readers to navigate. Currently I add a button for previous posts… but I will experiment with the ‘previous/next’ button you showed in this article. Thanks 🤩
As someone who started my Substack wanting to publish my fiction Ive experienced the frustration first hand with growth.
I've only really had luck writing short stories than chapter by chapter. Then again, I also have a problem with commiting to a certain piece of work for any length of time.
Anyway I think that at the moment, Short Stories are probably better for readers of my Substack than trying to publish a book chapter by chapter but I look forward to what happens with fiction in the future on here.
Love these! I don't know how I missed this when it was posted, but excellent ideas all around. I'll make sure to share them!
Do shout if you need more details or want guinea pigs.
Had missed this, too — might come in handy with what I am working on (Fancy Planet Travel Guides, for instance). Thank you, Simon!
Great! Shout out I'm ready. Or like Simon said I'm a willing guinea pig. After 20+ years in the military I can handle it. lol
I have one to add. Unless I am missing someting stories appear in the order they were posted based on date. I am doing a serial. This means the newest episode is at the top of the list. This is fine for regular postings.
I have a section specifically for my Series and this approach does not work here. I would like the ability to arrange Stories in a specific sequence so readers can easily see episodes in my series in the proper order which is not publish date.
I if am missing someting here, please let me know.
You're completely right. The only workaround at the moment which I'm aware of is to pin the first chapter to the top of the section. You can see how I've done it here: https://simonkjones.substack.com/s/tales-from-the-triverse
It works, but it's not necessarily very obvious to new readers, especially if they're not already familiar with other Substacks.
I do this to but I did not know you could pin someting to a section. That was a big help, thanks.
So pinning the first chapter is a great trick, but I get the sense that it's not just about highlighting the first one. That it's more about re-ordering your content so that it's in story order rather than posting order?
If so, I only see two options.
First, you can do what Simon mentioned above and create an index page listing the entries in the preferred reading order.
Second, you can cheat and change the "publication date" of your posts. Since they get listed in reverse chronological order, if you change the date of post B so that it appears to have been released before post A, it will get listed before A (well, under A, since it's in reverse).
You get the idea.
To change the date, BTW, just go to the settings of a published post and scroll down to the bottom. You can edit it from there.
It's not an ideal solution, but it'll do the trick.
Feels more like a hack than a fix, and if they ever do implement a proper solution it'd be a right pain to have to go back and re-edit the post dates into something useful. :D
True, but that's assuming you'd care about preserving the original dates. I would, personally, but others might not, which is why I mentioned this option. If it were me, though, I'd probably just go with an index.
Thanks Alex, that is what I am doing. It is doubtful that they will implement this, the real Use Case for substack is publishing individual articles and for that, dates make sense. It is was helpful just to validate what I thought was true.
I'd like to see this too. I'm not serialising anything at the moment but I'm considering if as a future option.
There is not, but I would like to see this as well. Why shouldn't the first page of your story be at the top?
Substack is still set up on the assumption that people are writing 'news' of some sort. And that the latest is the most important, and that you can pretty much jump onto a newsletter whenever you want. That's not how an ongoing story works, though, of course.
Really great ideas, Simon!
If Substack created a new "books" section type, this would help achieve some of what you're after and would be beneficial to poets, non-fiction writers, illustrators etc.
I really like the multimedia aspects of Substack - adding images, audio and the like. If these were paired with more traditional book layouts, it'd be amazing
Yeah! The real trick is expanding to do all these things without the platform disintegrating, or becoming too diffuse and confusing the readership. It's going to be a hard one to get right for the Substack team.
There are some really great ideas compiled into this post and it should be rich territory for the Substack product team to mine. My current frustration with the platform is actually not a new feature, but making a fundamental one work properly: Search! Try doing a search for "the memory of my shadow" and see if a single one of the 20 episodes of my novel that contain that very phrase in the title come up. I get the need to make the algorithm prioritize authors with bigger followings, but when an exact phrase does not show results, it feels wrong. Not sure if they're just not indexing any posts by authors with less than thousands of subscribers or what but search should be more of a level playing field for discovery.
Yep, good point. Searching for the title of my current serial 'Tales from the Triverse' gets zero results. It's not the name of my publication, but it's littered through loads of my posts. But it doesn't show up. Just a ton of weird American political stuff (which I'm guessing is actually the majority of Substacks - I just don't see any of that stuff normally).
You'd think having a weird word like 'triverse' in my title would make it easy for it to show up in search.
You've listed out all the things I wish Substack has! I've moved my stories to another site (fictionate.me) because its system suits a fiction writer. Writers can set their book as free for readers, 'pay-per-book' model, or monthly subscription. The 'pay-per-book' is what I was looking for. Readers pay for the book (even if it is in progress) and will have access to all chapters, including ones that the writer will add in the future. You can also have your book available as an audiobook, too. The site uses an AI to read your book. Now, if Substack has something like this, then I'll also definitely move my work here too.
Interesting no one replied to this comment. I'm new to Substack. Maybe everyone is still trying to fit a square peg into a round hole? if that is what is going on here?
It's a tricky puzzle. Some other platforms are more naturally suited to 'books' or even serialised fiction more generally, but they don't tend to have the reach, networking effects or ease-of-use of Substack. And they often are closed systems requiring registration for readers which don't share subscriber lists.
There's nothing perfect, basically. :) The benefits of Substack outweigh its slight awkwardness for fiction, so far, though.
Thanks, Cyndi! I'll definitely check out fictionate.me.
It would also be worth it, if the fiction section also had fiction and only fiction in it. I browsed through it the other day and it took me three pages to get get to some fiction to read.
Interesting point. I have specific sections for fiction, but I also publish the non-fiction stuff (like this post). However, in the 'fiction' section it'll just show my publication....which might not be what someone is after if they're wanting to actually READ some fiction, rather than read ABOUT fiction.
I hadn't thought about that angle, TBH, and it's a really good point. Being able to separate 'the discussion of fiction' from 'fiction stories to read' would be useful.
Great suggestions. But I think Substack is just eventually going to come out with its own online publishing service and publishing software suite that's integrated with the larger blogging apparatus that will make these ideas moot.
It's the clear path forward for them.
Do you mean an entirely separate platform dedicated to fiction that is loosely connected to the original Substack blogging platform and has all the fiction bells and whistles that Simon talks about here built in at the core level so we end up with the best of both worlds?
If so, then yes, I believe that would be the most elegant solution.
yes
Good!
These are all really great suggestions. As I publish more and more fiction to Substack, I agree that these changes would make the experience a lot better for readers. I use Substack as my main way of connecting with readers and making it as frictionless as possible would be tremendous. That said, there are a lot of really great aspects to this platform.
Great post - one thing I would add is that maybe what they have is a particular kind of section that is set up to be a book. There they could include your request list and the one that I would add is the ability to have a cover image specific to the section that is more like a book cover. It might also be nice in this new "book section" idea to have a place for actual chapters and then for additional materials like author notes, polls, extra material (like bonus scenes/novellas)--almost like a home base for the book (not sure how to deal with multiple book series).
Have a great summer!
The risk I think, with any of these requests, is ending up with too many edge cases. If they try to please us book writers, and poets, and musicians, and filmmakers, on top of what they already do, it could all start to get a bit messy. You could also end up with some really ugly publications that are using the options poorly. One of the benefits of being a Substack reader at the moment is that you're guaranteed a certain level of professional delivery and appearance (aside from the writing quality).
Yeah I can understand that. It seems like a section that can have sections isn’t too much. But I also like not having to maintain a website and newsletter so can fully appreciate what Substack brings to the table.
I personally don't feel the need for horizontal pagination or quick swiping between chapters, but a better index and more obvious next post buttons would definitely be nice, save me a lot of trouble. I also don't think bits like author commentary need such a complex solution, you can just scroll past them.
Edit: Would like to add that I also hope the substack team comes across this post.
I think having the ability to simply add a 'serial nav' bar at any point would solve the author commentary thing, without it being overly complex.
Substack has a built-in serial index if you put your serials in Sections (the Section index.) But it is newest to oldest order. I wish readers could toggle between newest to oldest and oldest to newest. That can't be that hard to code. Right now I pin Chapter One to the top of the Section index, but it not ideal. And the section index is not very compact. It require a lot of scrolling if your serial is long.
A Chapter One button at the top of each chapter in case someone opens a newer chapter and wants to start at the beginning would be nice.
For those who don't realize they can click on the section title and get to the section index, the pop-up index idea would work and be a nice compact alternative. If it was obvious to readers how to access it.
I like the "reader" idea.
A nav bar that has previous | index | next buttons, with the 'index' opening the drop-down list, would work quite nicely. That could either be a default elements for sections marked as being serials, or something that authors can insert from the 'More' menu.
Love these suggestions!
But keep in mind, the Previous and Next buttons only work if you have published your chapters in chronological order. I fumbled once, and injected a chapter in-between later, and this causes these buttons to move to the next published post, than the next chapter. Technically they are Previous Post and Next Post buttons, so if your serialised novel has non-chapter posts in-between, you’d have to wade through those as well.
And yes, I’ve been harping about how much more writer-friendly Substack is, as opposed to reader-friendly. There’s no way to track what posts and publication I’m currently reading, so I end up having to open them all as tabs. I currently have four Brave windows, each with dozens of tabs open. I’ve love to have a “currently-reading” section, with neat progress indicators or something similar.
In any case, Substack is a fairly nascent platform, and I’m not too worried, these features tend to get added over time. In the meanwhile, we just gotta keep doing our own hacks to navigate Substack’s quirks.
Always remember you can edit the date and time of any published post so if you ever posted something and it’s not in the order you want, you can fix that. Or move that post out of the section it’s in if it’s in the way.
Solid suggestions, Simon 👍
I'm behind these, for sure.
I also made a table of contents post for my novella, to help organise things, but it means also linking it in every post and updating it, etc.
I've seen a few people put hyperlinks (on numbers or numerals) as a horizontal across the very top of a post, which can work well, but also requires a lot of tweaking and ongoing updating as each post is published as you then have to update all back-entries.
What's a CTA?
I do really like the notion of having author commentary-type sections as toggleable on or off. Could be as simple as a paywall threshold setting when writing a post, so that it's only viewable if a reader has that setting on.
I'll add to this if anything comes to mind that I feel you haven't mentioned, but seems like you covered all the bases here.
CTA = call to action. Sorry, that's the marketing day job version of me assuming that everyone knows the acronyms. :D
And you've raised a good point - that once you have a serial with 70+ posts, going back and editing/updating custom nav items isn't really practical!
Thanks for the acronym. I should have googled 😅
Yeah I have some stuff coming out that I'd like to include in my custom 'nav bar' for my serial, but backporting it to all of the already written chapters would be a real pain. I have a template document I use to make stuff like that simpler in general.
i've been watching for these features for the whole last year as I get ready to move from nonfiction to Substack serial fiction. Has they really been no progress in the last year? did you do a follow up post? Also, excuse me if someone answered this, but what the hell is the real function of tags. Do they provide an interior index? I've already started a separate table of contents page that people can go to, but it just isn't as seamless as the other platforms. other things mentioned have also been in the back of my mind. I even asked them once about rearranging post on drafts so it'll be easier to publish them in order even alphabetically or by number would help if you can't dothem manually. Anyway, I love the platform, but these things really make it difficult Thanks for any insights!
I love the sound of all of these!! I write fiction (alongside non-fiction) on my Substack, and I would love for it to be easier for readers to navigate. Currently I add a button for previous posts… but I will experiment with the ‘previous/next’ button you showed in this article. Thanks 🤩
As someone who started my Substack wanting to publish my fiction Ive experienced the frustration first hand with growth.
I've only really had luck writing short stories than chapter by chapter. Then again, I also have a problem with commiting to a certain piece of work for any length of time.
Anyway I think that at the moment, Short Stories are probably better for readers of my Substack than trying to publish a book chapter by chapter but I look forward to what happens with fiction in the future on here.