I agree with Alex. I don’t think recaps or any other methods of “catching readers up” is a very effective way to get new readers. A recap might help a lapsed reader recall what they had read, but I think new readers will either start at the beginning or not. And a lot depends on if they like your writing/know you.
I don’t think I would try a serial by a writer I don’t know unless it was highly recommended by someone I know or had a lot of buzz around it. Or something else drew my attention to it. There is just too much out there to randomly try an unknown author. There has to be something that gets the reader to try your serial. That is the big obstacle. Once they try it, they will either like it and continue or quit reading.
Perhaps a “trailer”, or preview, like movies and TV show use could help, but you still have to get people to read the trailer.
It makes me wonder how the papers used to handle this in previous centuries--like when Dickens or Hugo serialized their works. They must have had the same problem, I imagine.
One thing I've learned though from writing a weekly serial is that it's not for me--it's too stressful for my taste lol. Once I'm done with the current "season" I think I'll switch to writing the whole thing as a novel and serializing that after it's completed.
That's an interesting historical analogue; it's not like you could go on the Internet to read the first section of A Tale of Two Cities if you first found out about it midway through.
And presumably back issues of the papers weren't easy to come by, either. Unless people held on to the papers and perhaps passed them around? Did libraries have copies?
"I've just returned from an impromptu trip to the Charles Dickens Museum in London where I spent 42 hours pouring through the archives and have discovered that...."
Back then, there were no distractions. You worked. You read the paper. You ate dinner. Rinse. Repeat. If you read the paper this was something you did every single day. Cover to cover. Not everyone, at least in Dickens day, could afford the paper. Also, not everyone knew how to read. Those two things were a “luxury” afforded by the upper class. If you could afford it then you did it daily.
If you were going to a dinner party, which might have been as often as one of high stature could afford to entertain guests with food and wine, then the serial may have been the topic of conversation amongst the group. I’m sure having a serial printed weekly (or in Dickens case I believe it was monthly) was a big deal bc you knew everyone who could afford the paper would be reading it.
Wasn’t till many decades later when middle and even lower class could not only afford to buy the paper but also felt it necessary to learn how to read. Strange to think that when circulation went up the price for such things decreased as did the caliber of “news” in the paper in order to attract the new audience. I would imagine space had to be made for the more salacious headlines and could no longer be reserved for what would today be considered “classic literature.”
Seems like there is a story to be told here about what happens when you want more eyeballs on a thing. The quality goes down but circulation and profit goes up...
Yep, good points. Far fewer distractions, at least in terms of available entertainment. It's hard to imagine a time when literature was comparatively rare to the glut we have today.
And Murdoch wasn't alive back then, so where is the evidence that the quality of a medium that was previously limited to very few took a dive in quality? There was no benchmark.
Speaking as a reader, yeah, signing up and seeing I have a back log of chapters to read would intimidate me. I probably wouldn't read then. I'd be the reader who would wait for you to release it as an ebook and get it that way so I can read before bed.
It might be something not to worry about much. Those who want to go back and catch up will. Those who are like me will wait for the ebook to read. And those who just don't bother...they aren't your target audience.
I wonder how much the chapter lengths affect the "ugh.." factor? When I scroll down and see a super long read of anything, I immediately subconsciously slide it over into "I'll read that later when I can devote my attention to it." I have a stack of 40 issues of a comic "I've been meaning to get to."
Do you think breaking up chapters into even smaller chunks would increase engagement and reduce the overwhelming sense of it? I think it would for me as a reader. But as a writer, that would be a bigger challenge to identify break points, or to have to write it with micro-chapters in mind.
With this in mind, how much more difficult would it be to cater the entire reading experience toward the limited-attention reader, and then worry about making it a proper "book" after the fact?
Fascinating all around. I'll be starting my serial experiment soon and I'm devouring case studies like this. Yours is the most thoughtful and willing to experiment that I've seen.
Really interesting thoughts! The chapter length I average at is 1,200 words, which is a length I've tuned into over the years, writing first on Wattpad and now on Substack. This seems to be a sweet spot in terms of being short enough to be bite-sized and easily read in a single sitting, while still having enough substance to move the story forward and be *worth* reading.
Any longer and you're competing directly with work/family/netflix/games/other books/cooking/etc for the reader's time and attention, which is dangerous. And shorter and I worry that the chapter would be too flimsy, and therefore unsatisfying.
I'm fairly sure that none of my previous books, or my current book, would work with shorter chapters. They're designed and structured around that 1200 word average.
THAT SAID, it'd be entirely possible to deliberately design a story into shorter chapters. But I think that does require it being a deliberate creative act, with pacing taken into careful consideration. Simply chunking up existing longer chapters would, I think, be a sub-par reading experience. (happy to be proved wrong!)
I've had this problem as a reader, long works in general intimidate me. Not sure if there's any real way around it, but the recap method seems like a good one. On the reader end maybe it could be approached like stumbling upon a new show at episode 15, keeping up with new episodes while also making time to go through the back catalog. Though this probably won't occur to anyone too young to know anything other than the streaming era.
As a writer my weird fake fighting game format actually seems to work well in regards to this issue, since each character's story is it's own continuity and therefore you don't need to read every character story and can just catch up with the current one. In theory at least.
Fascinating article, I think you've got some great ideas to try out and it will be interesting to see which ones work best! I'm earlier on in my serialisation journey than you are and I think that a new reader jumping in at 50 is going to be off putting in terms of reading the whole work. I'm thinking of pulling together all the chapters into a single PDF or ebook once the weekly chapters reach a suitable point in the story (say after 20 chapters?) This will then be Part 1 and I'll make it available and give new readers the option of going directly to there rather than navigating one chapter at a time. This will hopefully make it easier for the reader to navigate. Short stories do sound like a good idea too and I'm wondering it they could also be released as a serialisation and then pulled together into a single document? All the best, E
Great post and something I've been struggling with for several months. I suspect my new subscribers are also thinking the same thing as you surmise in your second alternative.
I include a one-sentence recap at the beginning of each chapter (but it is more pithy as opposed to a full recap) and I link to all prior chapters in that part of the book. I have interludes in each book that are placed in between each part so I just link to that. No clue whether people are clicking and reading back when they join and not sure whether I would want that tracking because I probably would over-analyze it too much!
For alternative ways to read, because my book is done, I could obviously offer the completed ebook. But that is priced at $5 (and included in my paid tier) so I don't want to make that perma-free. Maybe putting a link in the welcome post to the book so people can choose if they want to just buy the completed ebook or read for free.
One idea I had was to create an automation through my normal email newsletter provider that would send out a weekly email either replicating a chapter or providing a link to the Substack post. That way, people get prompted in their email (and get used to getting weekly chapters) and can read weekly at a set schedule rather than go through the entire archive of chapters, which would seem daunting.
It would be several hours (hopefully less) to set up for my first book but the beauty would be that it would be completely automated after that. People would be tagged and placed into an automation sequence that would run for almost a year.
Nice idea to give everyone the original weekly cadence.
I also have concerns about making ebook versions freely available - though that could be available only during the initial run, after which it'd be come a more polished, complete ebook available for purchase. So the ebook is a promotional tool during the serial run, then afterwards becomes a product in itself.
Thoughtful article, Simon. Appreciated. Will be good to hear your findings. Feeling the Substack USP is immediacy of content and conversation over convenience of format for fiction. Think the jury’s still out on its serialisation potential and more broadly whether modern readers (potentially shaped by bingeing media) really want their fiction in this way.
I think the likes of Wattpad have proven for a while that there's a huge appetite from a significant cohort of readers for serial fiction. The challenge, as ever, is in finding them - Wattpad has its walled garden of several million readers. Attracting serial fiction readers to Substack (or, more accurately, to individual author's newsletters) is the hard bit.
A killer feature for Substack would be the ability to provide a more Kindle-like reading experience as an option, whereby newsletters are compiled into an on-running, paginated scroll. It'd be useful for any serialise fiction or non-fiction.
Yep. Kindle equivalent reading experience would be a crucial change. I think it’s also time for a standalone Fiction section with its own subcategories and metrics separate from newsletters. This would increase fiction writers’ visibility and accessibility which is often the biggest initial publishing hurdle.
The work I'm serializing is 50 chapters, and I've also tried to think about how to keep readers engaged between posts (summaries, recaps, teasers, etc might work!) and get new readers interested now that more than half the chapters are up... I agree that there is a disconnect between the ideal of "ooh, free fiction" and "meh, this seems like a lot of work" so I've tried to streamline access to and between my chapters as much as possible. I'm also hoping to publish ebook and print versions at the end. I'm the kind of person who likes to binge the whole thing when it's done, so maybe there are some out there who would prefer to wait for the book version...?
Yeah, there's always a chunk of the audience who will simply wait. There are many legit reasons for that, including a fear of the author abandoning the project before it is finished.
Thanks, Reina. It's something that's been increasingly concerning me - especially because I'm aware that Triverse isn't anywhere near being completed, either. I think having multiple 'ways in' is the best solution, to cater for different types of readers. Some will like a one-pager summary so they can jump straight in at the latest chapter, others would like a visual summary, others will like to download a convenient ebook version to blitz through.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I feel like it's just a matter of reputation, so to speak.
I mean, let's take the example of a TV show. If it's something that's been hyped a lot and that feels like I 'm gonna like it, I'm more likely to binge-watch it. Otherwise, I might watch the first couple of episodes to see if I like it. Or I'll skip it entirely if I've never heard of it or whatnot.
It's probably going to be the same for serials. If it's something from an author you like, you probably won't mind reading it from the beginning--maybe even "binge reading" it ;) The hesitation really sets in when it's someone you don't know / have never read. Why invest so much time if you don't know the author? And the longer the serial is the less likely you are to get invested.
Now you could still have the same phenomenon as a TV show where you'll read the first couple of chapters and get hooked in. But that's perhaps more of a long shot with a serial than with a TV show, because reading itself is already a bigger investment (in time and effort) than watching television.
So I think the only effective 'fix' for this issue is to gain popularity, create hype, etc. Which is a whole other bag of worms.
For sure. In an ideal world, you could try out every new author, but there are now so many of us it's just not possible. So choices have to be made. Sometimes hard choices. But, more often than not, readers will just pick what's easier/more comfortable (ie. someone they already are familiar with, or have heard of through the grapevine or through media, etc.)
The majority of people will always go for the simplest/easiest options. That's why it's called pop music. The 'popular' stuff. Same in films, books, games and anything else. That's not a new phenomenon, though!
There will also always be people who hunt out the unusual and unheard. And everything in-between.
The internet and self-publishing may have deepened the problem somewhat due to sheer scale, but I don't feel like this is anything new. You could go back a century and there were already vastly more books than anyone could read in a lifetime.
I've actually heard this concern from readers, and at one time I considered trying to summarize all previous chapters, but that's also hard to do depending on how deep you need to go. I think this is a potential problem for readers, and I like some of the alternatives you have listed.
I'm posting a 'Previously' section at the start of each of my story's monthly chapters on Substack, which gets longer as longer as the reader needs to be filled in on more and more stuff that's happened before. But it's designed so that people can jump in anywhere. Incidentally, it's also turned out to be a really good way of writing a synopsis of the whole story. My story doesn't have that many readers at all, but readers I do have have said that they find the 'Previously' section helpful. I will eventually be publishing the story as ebooks too.
That's interesting, Faenon. I wonder how that works for regular readers, or for people who are catching up from the start? I can imagine increasingly large summaries before each chapter could be a bit awkward for binge readers, while being very useful for less frequent readers or people jumping on halfway.
My current thinking is to have a dedicated post with an ever-expanding/adjusting summary, that I can link to at the beginning of each chapter. This way I can keep everything tidy, but have a single place to update to bring people up to speed quickly.
"My current thinking is to have a dedicated post with an ever-expanding/adjusting summary, that I can link to at the beginning of each chapter. This way I can keep everything tidy, but have a single place to update to bring people up to speed quickly."
This was kinda what I was about to suggest. Simon thought of it first.
I think it depends on who you think your audience is on Substack.
No one is coming to Substack is here to read a novel, even if the newsletter is becoming a novel.
For anyone following fiction on Substack, as opposed to following a writer who is writing about their writing, already knows they'll be getting short bursts, or have the option of playing catch up. That's the nature of the medium and format.
Given competing distractions and reduced attention spans, there's nothing inherently good or bad about serialization.
Aren't people on Substack to find fresh writing and voices, whether fiction or non-fiction?
Short stories are an entirely different art form.
Having said all of those random things, it's clear that Substack only 'works' for well known or well established writers, in whatever field, and thus have an existing audience. It's weighted against new voices.
I'm not sure that's true. I wouldn't describe myself as a 'well established writer', but I'm very happy with how Substack is working for me in general. It does depend on how you define 'working', of course. I'd say Substack is less weighted against new voices than most other platform, just based on my own experience as a writer and reader. YMMV!
Well established, I mean the Substacks with tens of thousands of followers, of whom enough paid subscribers that the writer has an income from this source.
There's only a 10 percent conversion rate from reader to paid subscriptions, and this would be highly skewed to established writers.
One non-fiction Substack that I follow is in ranked highly, but with more than 8000 readers, only 140 are paid, which is well below the aggregate.
Again, it comes back to your purpose in having a Substack.
I don't have one, and after researching, there's less chance of gaining an audience than there was back in the day of old fashioned blogging.
So I don't have personal experience, only drawing on my due diligence.
Right - I don't think Substack is going to be quite as revolutionary for writers in general as some may have hoped. But that's nothing new. Writing has never been a good way to reliably generate an income. In traditional publishing, very few authors exclusively write their own fiction (or non-fiction). Most, even the 'successful' ones, still have to have supplemental jobs, either teaching, or ghost writing, or having a completely separate 'day job'.
That's mostly where I position my writing on Substack. If it can be a useful supplement to my main job, I'll be very happy. If I can also then have some additional avenues of writing income (eg via self-publishing, teaching, and so on) then all the better.
When I think about serializing a novel and if it could work I look to those who did a similar thing decades before us: the web serial. These are twice weekly, 5k+ words, of one place that have been written about for years. The main difference is that there is no “end” for web serials. And their fan base which numbers in the thousands or hundreds of thousands grew by word of mouth. When someone new discovered “Worm” they didn’t cringe when they discovered 1 million words and many years had already been written! They didn’t run away in anger and frustration. They rolled up their sleeves, grabbed a drink, and hunkered down to reading. Why? Because someone who loves such works by George RR Martin or is tired of waiting for his next tome a decade from now, is hungry for the challenge of a long long long, maybe even never-ending, tale.
Is that reader our “target audience”? Maybe. They may not want to read our serial because our end result is not never ending but concluding so that we may produce a final product; ie a book to put on our shelves. But they would be up for the challenge. They’d love the concept of weekly chapters. The suspense of what comes next.
I plan on revisiting my novels going up as a serial and couching to an audience of Worm readers as a “never-ending” story that they’ll soon get to put on their shelves. But I’m waiting till all the books in a series are written so instead of releasing a book that’s 40 chapters I’ll release 5/6 that’s 100+ chapters and will likely take a couple years is not longer to get out there. Because while I may not want to write the same character over the course of a decade with 10 million words, I do have an entire universe planned with 60+ books and a similar word count when it’s all said and done. It’s all in how you market it to that kind of reader. Also genre helps.
The reader is out there but bc this is different means when it’s a serial the novel reader (ie person who buys the whole book) isn’t the audience. The web serial reader is the audience. But when the book is all released and ready to go up on Amazon then the audience can and will be different. I realize that now and will change how I promote accordingly. It will mean having two different audiences at two different stages of my writing but that’s ok bc at least now I know what to do and how to move forward with this information. And who knows, if my idea works, the reader who buys the book may subscribe to read it before it’s published and the one who reads it weekly in my newsletter may turn around and buy the book when it’s published!
I agree with Alex. I don’t think recaps or any other methods of “catching readers up” is a very effective way to get new readers. A recap might help a lapsed reader recall what they had read, but I think new readers will either start at the beginning or not. And a lot depends on if they like your writing/know you.
I don’t think I would try a serial by a writer I don’t know unless it was highly recommended by someone I know or had a lot of buzz around it. Or something else drew my attention to it. There is just too much out there to randomly try an unknown author. There has to be something that gets the reader to try your serial. That is the big obstacle. Once they try it, they will either like it and continue or quit reading.
Perhaps a “trailer”, or preview, like movies and TV show use could help, but you still have to get people to read the trailer.
It makes me wonder how the papers used to handle this in previous centuries--like when Dickens or Hugo serialized their works. They must have had the same problem, I imagine.
One thing I've learned though from writing a weekly serial is that it's not for me--it's too stressful for my taste lol. Once I'm done with the current "season" I think I'll switch to writing the whole thing as a novel and serializing that after it's completed.
That's an interesting historical analogue; it's not like you could go on the Internet to read the first section of A Tale of Two Cities if you first found out about it midway through.
And presumably back issues of the papers weren't easy to come by, either. Unless people held on to the papers and perhaps passed them around? Did libraries have copies?
I'm quite curious about this, now....
Next week on Write More with Simon K Jones:
"I've just returned from an impromptu trip to the Charles Dickens Museum in London where I spent 42 hours pouring through the archives and have discovered that...."
Back then, there were no distractions. You worked. You read the paper. You ate dinner. Rinse. Repeat. If you read the paper this was something you did every single day. Cover to cover. Not everyone, at least in Dickens day, could afford the paper. Also, not everyone knew how to read. Those two things were a “luxury” afforded by the upper class. If you could afford it then you did it daily.
If you were going to a dinner party, which might have been as often as one of high stature could afford to entertain guests with food and wine, then the serial may have been the topic of conversation amongst the group. I’m sure having a serial printed weekly (or in Dickens case I believe it was monthly) was a big deal bc you knew everyone who could afford the paper would be reading it.
Wasn’t till many decades later when middle and even lower class could not only afford to buy the paper but also felt it necessary to learn how to read. Strange to think that when circulation went up the price for such things decreased as did the caliber of “news” in the paper in order to attract the new audience. I would imagine space had to be made for the more salacious headlines and could no longer be reserved for what would today be considered “classic literature.”
Seems like there is a story to be told here about what happens when you want more eyeballs on a thing. The quality goes down but circulation and profit goes up...
Yep, good points. Far fewer distractions, at least in terms of available entertainment. It's hard to imagine a time when literature was comparatively rare to the glut we have today.
Economies of scale.
And Murdoch wasn't alive back then, so where is the evidence that the quality of a medium that was previously limited to very few took a dive in quality? There was no benchmark.
Speaking as a reader, yeah, signing up and seeing I have a back log of chapters to read would intimidate me. I probably wouldn't read then. I'd be the reader who would wait for you to release it as an ebook and get it that way so I can read before bed.
It might be something not to worry about much. Those who want to go back and catch up will. Those who are like me will wait for the ebook to read. And those who just don't bother...they aren't your target audience.
Good advice! And yes, providing options for different types of reader is the way to go.
I wonder how much the chapter lengths affect the "ugh.." factor? When I scroll down and see a super long read of anything, I immediately subconsciously slide it over into "I'll read that later when I can devote my attention to it." I have a stack of 40 issues of a comic "I've been meaning to get to."
Do you think breaking up chapters into even smaller chunks would increase engagement and reduce the overwhelming sense of it? I think it would for me as a reader. But as a writer, that would be a bigger challenge to identify break points, or to have to write it with micro-chapters in mind.
With this in mind, how much more difficult would it be to cater the entire reading experience toward the limited-attention reader, and then worry about making it a proper "book" after the fact?
Fascinating all around. I'll be starting my serial experiment soon and I'm devouring case studies like this. Yours is the most thoughtful and willing to experiment that I've seen.
Really interesting thoughts! The chapter length I average at is 1,200 words, which is a length I've tuned into over the years, writing first on Wattpad and now on Substack. This seems to be a sweet spot in terms of being short enough to be bite-sized and easily read in a single sitting, while still having enough substance to move the story forward and be *worth* reading.
Any longer and you're competing directly with work/family/netflix/games/other books/cooking/etc for the reader's time and attention, which is dangerous. And shorter and I worry that the chapter would be too flimsy, and therefore unsatisfying.
I'm fairly sure that none of my previous books, or my current book, would work with shorter chapters. They're designed and structured around that 1200 word average.
THAT SAID, it'd be entirely possible to deliberately design a story into shorter chapters. But I think that does require it being a deliberate creative act, with pacing taken into careful consideration. Simply chunking up existing longer chapters would, I think, be a sub-par reading experience. (happy to be proved wrong!)
I've had this problem as a reader, long works in general intimidate me. Not sure if there's any real way around it, but the recap method seems like a good one. On the reader end maybe it could be approached like stumbling upon a new show at episode 15, keeping up with new episodes while also making time to go through the back catalog. Though this probably won't occur to anyone too young to know anything other than the streaming era.
As a writer my weird fake fighting game format actually seems to work well in regards to this issue, since each character's story is it's own continuity and therefore you don't need to read every character story and can just catch up with the current one. In theory at least.
Fascinating article, I think you've got some great ideas to try out and it will be interesting to see which ones work best! I'm earlier on in my serialisation journey than you are and I think that a new reader jumping in at 50 is going to be off putting in terms of reading the whole work. I'm thinking of pulling together all the chapters into a single PDF or ebook once the weekly chapters reach a suitable point in the story (say after 20 chapters?) This will then be Part 1 and I'll make it available and give new readers the option of going directly to there rather than navigating one chapter at a time. This will hopefully make it easier for the reader to navigate. Short stories do sound like a good idea too and I'm wondering it they could also be released as a serialisation and then pulled together into a single document? All the best, E
Great post and something I've been struggling with for several months. I suspect my new subscribers are also thinking the same thing as you surmise in your second alternative.
I include a one-sentence recap at the beginning of each chapter (but it is more pithy as opposed to a full recap) and I link to all prior chapters in that part of the book. I have interludes in each book that are placed in between each part so I just link to that. No clue whether people are clicking and reading back when they join and not sure whether I would want that tracking because I probably would over-analyze it too much!
For alternative ways to read, because my book is done, I could obviously offer the completed ebook. But that is priced at $5 (and included in my paid tier) so I don't want to make that perma-free. Maybe putting a link in the welcome post to the book so people can choose if they want to just buy the completed ebook or read for free.
One idea I had was to create an automation through my normal email newsletter provider that would send out a weekly email either replicating a chapter or providing a link to the Substack post. That way, people get prompted in their email (and get used to getting weekly chapters) and can read weekly at a set schedule rather than go through the entire archive of chapters, which would seem daunting.
It would be several hours (hopefully less) to set up for my first book but the beauty would be that it would be completely automated after that. People would be tagged and placed into an automation sequence that would run for almost a year.
Nice idea to give everyone the original weekly cadence.
I also have concerns about making ebook versions freely available - though that could be available only during the initial run, after which it'd be come a more polished, complete ebook available for purchase. So the ebook is a promotional tool during the serial run, then afterwards becomes a product in itself.
Thoughtful article, Simon. Appreciated. Will be good to hear your findings. Feeling the Substack USP is immediacy of content and conversation over convenience of format for fiction. Think the jury’s still out on its serialisation potential and more broadly whether modern readers (potentially shaped by bingeing media) really want their fiction in this way.
I think the likes of Wattpad have proven for a while that there's a huge appetite from a significant cohort of readers for serial fiction. The challenge, as ever, is in finding them - Wattpad has its walled garden of several million readers. Attracting serial fiction readers to Substack (or, more accurately, to individual author's newsletters) is the hard bit.
A killer feature for Substack would be the ability to provide a more Kindle-like reading experience as an option, whereby newsletters are compiled into an on-running, paginated scroll. It'd be useful for any serialise fiction or non-fiction.
Yep. Kindle equivalent reading experience would be a crucial change. I think it’s also time for a standalone Fiction section with its own subcategories and metrics separate from newsletters. This would increase fiction writers’ visibility and accessibility which is often the biggest initial publishing hurdle.
The work I'm serializing is 50 chapters, and I've also tried to think about how to keep readers engaged between posts (summaries, recaps, teasers, etc might work!) and get new readers interested now that more than half the chapters are up... I agree that there is a disconnect between the ideal of "ooh, free fiction" and "meh, this seems like a lot of work" so I've tried to streamline access to and between my chapters as much as possible. I'm also hoping to publish ebook and print versions at the end. I'm the kind of person who likes to binge the whole thing when it's done, so maybe there are some out there who would prefer to wait for the book version...?
Yeah, there's always a chunk of the audience who will simply wait. There are many legit reasons for that, including a fear of the author abandoning the project before it is finished.
I'll admit, I'm a reader who feels overwhelmed jumping into chapter 50 of a work.
You make some great suggestions to ease readers into larger projects. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks, Reina. It's something that's been increasingly concerning me - especially because I'm aware that Triverse isn't anywhere near being completed, either. I think having multiple 'ways in' is the best solution, to cater for different types of readers. Some will like a one-pager summary so they can jump straight in at the latest chapter, others would like a visual summary, others will like to download a convenient ebook version to blitz through.
You know, the more I think about it, the more I feel like it's just a matter of reputation, so to speak.
I mean, let's take the example of a TV show. If it's something that's been hyped a lot and that feels like I 'm gonna like it, I'm more likely to binge-watch it. Otherwise, I might watch the first couple of episodes to see if I like it. Or I'll skip it entirely if I've never heard of it or whatnot.
It's probably going to be the same for serials. If it's something from an author you like, you probably won't mind reading it from the beginning--maybe even "binge reading" it ;) The hesitation really sets in when it's someone you don't know / have never read. Why invest so much time if you don't know the author? And the longer the serial is the less likely you are to get invested.
Now you could still have the same phenomenon as a TV show where you'll read the first couple of chapters and get hooked in. But that's perhaps more of a long shot with a serial than with a TV show, because reading itself is already a bigger investment (in time and effort) than watching television.
So I think the only effective 'fix' for this issue is to gain popularity, create hype, etc. Which is a whole other bag of worms.
Every author you've read for the first time is an author you didn't know.
For sure. In an ideal world, you could try out every new author, but there are now so many of us it's just not possible. So choices have to be made. Sometimes hard choices. But, more often than not, readers will just pick what's easier/more comfortable (ie. someone they already are familiar with, or have heard of through the grapevine or through media, etc.)
Yeah, you have to filter somehow, just from a purely practical point of view, and recommendations/popularity/hype is an easy filter to apply.
There go the dreams of every Substack fiction writer, and the dreams of every aspiring fiction writer.
But, I never stick to one author, nor even a genre, and rarely buy from any top seller lists (which is dominated by romance, btw).
I suppose it depends if people are reading to be comforted or to be challenged.
The majority of people will always go for the simplest/easiest options. That's why it's called pop music. The 'popular' stuff. Same in films, books, games and anything else. That's not a new phenomenon, though!
There will also always be people who hunt out the unusual and unheard. And everything in-between.
The internet and self-publishing may have deepened the problem somewhat due to sheer scale, but I don't feel like this is anything new. You could go back a century and there were already vastly more books than anyone could read in a lifetime.
I look forward to hearing how this goes for you.
Do you have a one page summary for Triverse yet?
Not yet! Will be working on it this week. ;)
I've actually heard this concern from readers, and at one time I considered trying to summarize all previous chapters, but that's also hard to do depending on how deep you need to go. I think this is a potential problem for readers, and I like some of the alternatives you have listed.
Indeed. I don't think there's a single 'perfect' solution, but poking at a few of these will hopefully help some potential readers.
I'm posting a 'Previously' section at the start of each of my story's monthly chapters on Substack, which gets longer as longer as the reader needs to be filled in on more and more stuff that's happened before. But it's designed so that people can jump in anywhere. Incidentally, it's also turned out to be a really good way of writing a synopsis of the whole story. My story doesn't have that many readers at all, but readers I do have have said that they find the 'Previously' section helpful. I will eventually be publishing the story as ebooks too.
That's interesting, Faenon. I wonder how that works for regular readers, or for people who are catching up from the start? I can imagine increasingly large summaries before each chapter could be a bit awkward for binge readers, while being very useful for less frequent readers or people jumping on halfway.
My current thinking is to have a dedicated post with an ever-expanding/adjusting summary, that I can link to at the beginning of each chapter. This way I can keep everything tidy, but have a single place to update to bring people up to speed quickly.
"My current thinking is to have a dedicated post with an ever-expanding/adjusting summary, that I can link to at the beginning of each chapter. This way I can keep everything tidy, but have a single place to update to bring people up to speed quickly."
This was kinda what I was about to suggest. Simon thought of it first.
Now that's a very good idea. My thinking with my current way of doing it is that binge readers can just skip the 'previously' sections!
I like serials here on Substack. If I start one and really like it, i go to kindle and try to find it. If I do, I buy it and read it on the kindle.
I think it depends on who you think your audience is on Substack.
No one is coming to Substack is here to read a novel, even if the newsletter is becoming a novel.
For anyone following fiction on Substack, as opposed to following a writer who is writing about their writing, already knows they'll be getting short bursts, or have the option of playing catch up. That's the nature of the medium and format.
Given competing distractions and reduced attention spans, there's nothing inherently good or bad about serialization.
Aren't people on Substack to find fresh writing and voices, whether fiction or non-fiction?
Short stories are an entirely different art form.
Having said all of those random things, it's clear that Substack only 'works' for well known or well established writers, in whatever field, and thus have an existing audience. It's weighted against new voices.
I'm not sure that's true. I wouldn't describe myself as a 'well established writer', but I'm very happy with how Substack is working for me in general. It does depend on how you define 'working', of course. I'd say Substack is less weighted against new voices than most other platform, just based on my own experience as a writer and reader. YMMV!
Well established, I mean the Substacks with tens of thousands of followers, of whom enough paid subscribers that the writer has an income from this source.
There's only a 10 percent conversion rate from reader to paid subscriptions, and this would be highly skewed to established writers.
One non-fiction Substack that I follow is in ranked highly, but with more than 8000 readers, only 140 are paid, which is well below the aggregate.
Again, it comes back to your purpose in having a Substack.
I don't have one, and after researching, there's less chance of gaining an audience than there was back in the day of old fashioned blogging.
So I don't have personal experience, only drawing on my due diligence.
Right - I don't think Substack is going to be quite as revolutionary for writers in general as some may have hoped. But that's nothing new. Writing has never been a good way to reliably generate an income. In traditional publishing, very few authors exclusively write their own fiction (or non-fiction). Most, even the 'successful' ones, still have to have supplemental jobs, either teaching, or ghost writing, or having a completely separate 'day job'.
That's mostly where I position my writing on Substack. If it can be a useful supplement to my main job, I'll be very happy. If I can also then have some additional avenues of writing income (eg via self-publishing, teaching, and so on) then all the better.
If you're happy and gain fulfillment from the effort, that's what matters.
When I think about serializing a novel and if it could work I look to those who did a similar thing decades before us: the web serial. These are twice weekly, 5k+ words, of one place that have been written about for years. The main difference is that there is no “end” for web serials. And their fan base which numbers in the thousands or hundreds of thousands grew by word of mouth. When someone new discovered “Worm” they didn’t cringe when they discovered 1 million words and many years had already been written! They didn’t run away in anger and frustration. They rolled up their sleeves, grabbed a drink, and hunkered down to reading. Why? Because someone who loves such works by George RR Martin or is tired of waiting for his next tome a decade from now, is hungry for the challenge of a long long long, maybe even never-ending, tale.
Is that reader our “target audience”? Maybe. They may not want to read our serial because our end result is not never ending but concluding so that we may produce a final product; ie a book to put on our shelves. But they would be up for the challenge. They’d love the concept of weekly chapters. The suspense of what comes next.
I plan on revisiting my novels going up as a serial and couching to an audience of Worm readers as a “never-ending” story that they’ll soon get to put on their shelves. But I’m waiting till all the books in a series are written so instead of releasing a book that’s 40 chapters I’ll release 5/6 that’s 100+ chapters and will likely take a couple years is not longer to get out there. Because while I may not want to write the same character over the course of a decade with 10 million words, I do have an entire universe planned with 60+ books and a similar word count when it’s all said and done. It’s all in how you market it to that kind of reader. Also genre helps.
The reader is out there but bc this is different means when it’s a serial the novel reader (ie person who buys the whole book) isn’t the audience. The web serial reader is the audience. But when the book is all released and ready to go up on Amazon then the audience can and will be different. I realize that now and will change how I promote accordingly. It will mean having two different audiences at two different stages of my writing but that’s ok bc at least now I know what to do and how to move forward with this information. And who knows, if my idea works, the reader who buys the book may subscribe to read it before it’s published and the one who reads it weekly in my newsletter may turn around and buy the book when it’s published!
Some of us cannot afford fancy coffee and are dealing with 19,980 unread emails.
Have a blessed day.
Hi Barbara - everything I publish here is free to read, and entirely optional. You can always adjust your subscription settings if you want.
Good luck with the inbox!