How to (very, very slowly) cultivate a fiction newsletter: part 1

Fiction is always hard, but not impossible

Writing fiction is hard. Finding readers is even harder. Achieving success, regardless of how you personally measure it, is near impossible.

Near impossible. It used to be a lot harder, back when publishing was an all-or-nothing endeavour. These days, we have options.

Over the last three years I’ve stumbled my way through setting up a newsletter, and it’s gone fairly well. Not life-changingly well, as with some of the off-the-charts subscription success stories we hear about, but well enough to make me a very, very satisfied writer.

And let’s face it, trying to follow tips from the Super Mega Successful newsletters isn’t always a good option, because they’re the weird outliers. It’s impossible to replicate their path, because it was a combination of unique factors (often including 20+ years of prior professional success).

Here’s some context for what I’m talking about:

Depending on where you’re coming from, 5.5k subscribers might seem like a crazily, amazingly huge number, or it might seem rather piddling. That’s how this goes, and why you shouldn’t ever compare yourself to other people in this game. But yes, if that chart and the number seems interesting and relevant to what you’re doing, read on.

This post is about how I’ve done it. Your mileage may, of course, vary. Some of this won’t fit what you want to do with your time and skills. Pick and choose what you find useful. Don’t focus on ‘growth’, because that will make you miserable.

Ultimately, do whatever makes you happy, and helps you to keep writing.

Frequency

I send out two newsletters every week. On Mondays I send a non-fiction piece (like this one!) which usually explores the nuts-and-bolts of writing serial fiction, or publishing a newsletter. On Fridays I send out a new chapter of my ongoing fiction serial, Tales from the Triverse.¹

I’ve been sending out these two newsletters since the summer of 2021.

Sending at least one newsletter per week was essential from the beginning. Any less and I’d never gain traction, or lodge in the brains of readers. I wanted the newsletter to be a welcome part of people’s lives, popping into their inboxes on a regular basis, such that readers would look forward to it each week.

Doing more than two per week seemed like the wrong approach. In practical terms, it wouldn’t really be possible — I simply can’t produce that much material without the quality (or my health) suffering. But even aside from that, I think more than two newsletters per week starts to become intrusive, and annoying, and difficult for readers to keep up with.

Two newsletters, therefore, seemed like the sweet spot.

Consistency

Two newsletters per week only makes sense if I stick to that schedule. If I do two newsletters, then take a break and don’t post again for a month, it’ll confuse readers.

Much like a TV show, it’s important to meet audience expectations. Going dark for unpredictable periods makes it difficult for anyone to become enthusiastic about your writing, especially if you’re a fiction writer. Non-fiction is perhaps less reliant on consistency, but if you’re telling a story, readers need reliable, consistent delivery.

It’s what makes the difference between a one-off ‘that was useful’ article, where a reader swings by for a single piece of information and leaves again, and a regular reader who actively looks forward to reading your next piece. That enthusiasm is directly related to familiarity.

Even if your work is remarkable and ground-breaking, its delivery should be entirely predictable.

The important exception here is if you need a break. Whatever the reason, if you need to hit pause, simply explain it to your readers, take some time, then come back when you said you would. Like taking holiday from a day job: employees don’t just vanish for days or weeks at a time, as that would be chaotic — instead, we book specific holiday leave, and everyone knows what’s going on.

Mix it up

This, I suspect, will be controversial and quite unpalatable to some of you. Which is fine. But here’s the thing:

When I started here in 2021, I was starting more-or-less from scratch. Nobody knew who I was, or whether it was worth reading my fiction. My newsletter was brand new, so there was no pre-existing audience to provide social proof.

Attracting readers to fiction is very difficult, because it’s a hugely saturated market. There is an infinity of stories to read, many of them very, very good. Why would anyone bother to read a science fiction story by Simon K Rando, when they could go and read a genre classic or an award winning modern novel? Sure, some people actively seek out the new and interesting and unexpected, but that’s an even slower road.

That’s partly how I ended up with the other half of this newsletter: the non-fiction bit, like the piece you’re reading right now. It’s the how-to, and the journal, and the magazine, and it has vastly more audience potential than the fiction. This is where I can share my experience and thoughts, hopefully in a helpful way, and answer questions other writers may have.

I suspect most subscribers come for the non-fiction, but perhaps stay for the fiction.

Critically, those two halves to the newsletter are not mutually exclusive, but are in fact tightly intertwined. There are a lot of gurus and snake oil salespeople and dodgy ‘hybrid publishing’ companies trying to take advantage of fiction writers, most of which are united by a common attribute: they haven’t actually written anything decent themselves.

I don’t want to be one of those internet guys spouting opinions and presenting them as ‘wisdom’. Hence, the fiction chapters that go out on Friday serve as a kind of proof, evidencing that I know what I’m talking about. Or, at the very least, it gives readers the opportunity to sense check what I’m saying. And in the reverse direction, fans of the stories get to go behind the curtain and find out how something like Tales from the Triverse gets made.

It’s a nice feedback loop.

This is also why you won’t find me talking much about paid subscriptions. My advice to date has focused very much on writing serials, on putting a newsletter together, on finding readers and so on. All things that I can point to and demonstrate that I’ve walked the walk. Having anything useful to say about paid subs is something I’m only now getting towards, and I’ll only write about that when I have something useful to say.

This is a tricky one, because a lot of you will just want to write some damned fiction. Which is entirely fair enough. It will make it harder and slower to find readers, if you just do fiction, but at the same time you’ll know those readers are 100% there for the fiction. The question I always have is how many of my readers are here for the non-fiction compared to the fiction: ultimately, it doesn’t really matter to me, because I love doing both, and as long as it’s resulting in me writing more, I’m all good.

Whisper it: SEO

It’s OK, don’t run away screaming. If you’re a fiction writer, chances are the last thing you want to be thinking about is Search Engine Optimisation. It’s grim just reading it.

This is the unexpected benefit of the non-fiction stuff I’ve been writing. I’ve ended up getting a lot of readers from Google and other search engines, largely thanks to the non-fiction pieces. This wasn’t planned, but it does make complete sense in retrospect.

The reality of how search engines work is that nobody really uses them to find new or unknown fiction. You can’t really search for that, by definition. You might search for a book that is new to you, but it’s still going to be ‘known’ in some capacity if it’s showing up in searches: top 10 lists, award winners etc.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, would be searching for Tales from the Triverse. If they were searching for portal fiction, they’d find a lot of other stuff before getting anywhere near what I do.

The non-fiction articles I write are at the opposite end of the spectrum. They often provide guides or how-tos to common questions. That makes them ideal for showing up in search results. As such, this newsletter frequently pops up when people are searching on Google for anything about serial fiction, writing fiction on Substack, and so on.

Again, mixing up your newsletter to include more than just your fiction can really help. As long as there’s some kind of logical connection from the non-fiction to the fiction, you’re still going to get some cross-pollination.

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Thanks for reading!

Next week I’m going to carry on with this, digging into further topics such as:

• Getting the free/paid model right

• Audiences

• Keeping it simple

• Ideal post length

• Networking & community

Update: you can now read that post here:

In the meantime, stick some of this podcast in your ears, featuring John Ward and Scoot, which covers some adjacent territory and was probably partly responsible for me writing today’s post:

The Scooterview!

I turned 44 last week (!) and received a couple of very exciting books:

These art books cover the games Citizen Sleeper (the creator of which writes over at Jump Over the Age Newsletter) and Sable, two of the most visually arresting games of recent years. They’re produced by publisher Lost in Cult, who do all sorts of fancy art books that I’ve been eyeing for years but could never quite justify the cost. Anyway, they are indeed gorgeous, and I think anyone interested in game development or concept art would have a good time.

Lastly, given that this week is going to be quite stressful for a lot of you who read this newsletter, here’s a relaxing photo of my son gazing out over a Suffolk field that was practically glowing green yesterday:

1. I also send a newsletter on Wednesdays, journaling my rewatch of 1990s TV show Babylon 5, but this goes to a very small, opt-in audience and doesn’t really count to the newsletter’s overall reach.