How to help new readers get on board a long-running serial

Spoiler: it's all about having an index

Today’s post is for all you writers of serials. be they fiction or non-fiction.

Helping readers navigate online serials is critically important. Back in May I put together a sweeping overview of how to build your own newsletter-based serial:

Today I’m drilling into a specific aspect of writing online serials, particularly if you’re doing it via your own website or newsletter: the idea of the ‘index’ post. You can see one of mine here, as an example.

Indexes do a lot of the heavy lifting for new readers and shouldn’t be underestimated.

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But wait, I hear you cry, why not publish on something like Wattpad, where it’s already solved all these UX issues?

It’s a good question. My detailed answer can be found here. The short answer is that most of those platforms are closed and proprietary, meaning you don’t own your audience and are therefore always in thrall to their corporate whims. Using Substack, Ghost, beehiiv, Buttondown and so on requires more work, but you’re building something that is more future-proofed.

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Before the index

It’s tricky to crunch numbers specifically, but anecdotally it is interesting to compare my newsletter and serial before and after having an index.

I started publishing Tales from the Triverse in mid-2021 and for the first year and a bit I had no particular organisational structure beyond putting it in its own section. I sent out a new chapter each week, maybe shared it on social media, and that was about it.

That worked for maybe the first half a dozen chapters. Beyond that, though, I began to sense that I wasn’t attracting many new readers. As the serial grew, the idea of jumping on board became an increasingly intimidating experience. I wrote about it in September 2022, unsure of what to do about it.

Bear in mind I was 50 chapters into the damned thing by that point. An entire year, and I was still entirely clueless! There were problems, many of them very small, several of which had easy fixes — in retrospect they’re all quite obvious, but at the time I was flailing about in the dark and trying to figure out how to go it alone without the infrastructure of a Wattpad or a Royal Road.

After the index

Inexplicably, it wasn’t until January 2023 that I created the ‘index’ post, which is currently titled ‘Start reading here’.

Like I say, it’s anecdotal and based on general vibes rather than data, but after publishing that index and stapling it to the front of my Substack, new readers started to hop on board. The serial and my newsletter in general seemed to ‘click’.

Designing the index wasn’t a simple matter of just listing all the chapters. I had to consider what to include and also, perhaps more importantly, what to not include.

The index is linked to at the start of every single Triverse chapter. This means that if a new reader lands on a random chapter, for whatever reason, they can easily hop to the start and figure out what the hell is going on. One click and they’re good to go, regardless of their entry point.

I use the copy ‘Choose another story’ instead of ‘Read from the start’ or ‘Get started here’. I don’t know if this is a good call or not: but it seems appropriate for this particular serial, and emphasises that a new reader could hop on wherever they want. I benefit here from Triverse being an anthology series:

The way I’ve structured Triverse is as a collected series of short stories, inter-connected but also semi-standalone. Most of those stories are multi-part. Each story has a defined name, but not each part. Hence a storyline called ‘An unintended life’ will go out as newsletters with titles ‘An unintended life: part 1’, ‘An unintended life: part 2’ and so on.

Listing all of those individual parts would be visually absurd and require a daft amount of scrolling. Being able to navigate to an individual part in the context of the index didn’t have a strong use case: new readers wouldn’t be doing that, and regular readers probably wouldn’t be able to remember the precise part within a story if they were looking for something in particular.

I settled on breaking the overall serial into ‘seasons’ and ‘episodes’. The seasonal structure is largely imposed after the fact and has little bearing on the story itself, BUT it makes the whole thing more approachable. It is immediately easy to understand, borrowing terminology from television. It made navigation more obvious, subtly made the point that you could hop on whenever you wanted, and explained the notion of an online serial without having to actually explain it.

By collapsing multi-part storylines into single ‘episodes’ in the index, it makes Tales from the Triverse far less intimidating to a newcomer. A five-part story becomes a single link.

Alongside the episode titles, each of which links through, I also added one-line summaries. Again borrowing from TV, these are a bit like the summary you might see on a Netflix episode listing. The reference is not to the novel — I think comparisons to novels are actually quite unhelpful, because an ongoing serial bears very little resemblance to the experience of reading a novel. Sure, they both tell their stories using words, but structurally and practically they function entirely differently.

A critical aspect was dropping the chapter numbers. I removed these not only from the index but also from each individual post that had already been published.¹ The numbering didn’t help with navigation and only served to emphasise the sheer (ever-increasing) length of the serial. It made the reading commitment feel unwieldy, like a mountain to climb.

Here’s the bad user journey:

1. Someone recommends Tales from the Triverse

2. The potential new reader ends up on the web version of the latest chapter, called ‘Chapter 245: [Exciting story name]: part 6’

3. They think, wtf, I’m not catching up on 245 chapters

4. Leaves. Possibly blocks me.

Here’s the good user journey of the same thing:

1. Someone recommends Tales from the Triverse

2. The potential new reader ends up on the web version of the latest chapter, called ‘[Exciting story name]: part 6’

3. They think, hm, what is this? Part 6, eh?

4. Clicks the ‘Choose a different story’ link at the top of the chapter

5. Lands on the index, explores a bit, dives in

6. Turns out that person is an influential publisher, who buys the rights to the print version

7. Denis Villeneuve develops the TV show adaptation

8. People go to Comic Cons dressed as characters from Triverse

9. I think ‘phew, good job I made that index’

Most people will fall somewhere in-between those two extremes.

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Thanks for reading. Hope that was useful.

I should tip my hat towards

Clifford Stumme

for sending my brain off in this general direction with his note a couple of weeks back:

One thing to emphasise with all this is that I’m still figuring all this out. I think we all are, especially in the newsletter space. If you have developed any ideas that help your readers — or, indeed, if you’re a reader and want to suggest something — do jump down into the comments.

Earlier this week I continued my rewatch of Babylon 5 with a really bad episode that simply wouldn’t be made today. I’m still startled that it was made in the mid-90s without anyone in the case and crew putting up a hand and saying “er, can we talk about this?”

Lastly, this note seemed to resonate with an amusingly large number of people:

Thanks again, and see you all later in the week for more Triverse.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

1. Going back through 60+ chapters and editing their titles one by one was enormous fun, given Substack’s lack of bulk-editing features, let me tell you.