Can fiction succeed on Substack? How serialised novels can work with modern technology.
Artistic innovation is the answer
The question of why fiction hasn’t yet become a major part of Substack is often answered with a focus on the readers: it’s more expensive to buy a serialised novel than a book; readers prefer to gulp a novel down on a plane or a beach, not piecemeal on their phone. There are also ideas about the design of Substack itself. In a recent discussion, , , and talked about needing to allow people to find network and status benefits of reading a novel on Substack. When you read offline, you get to show people the book, put it on your desk, carry a bookish tote bag, and so on. Substack doesn’t yet have those features that make it important to read this novel now because everyone else is reading it.
This all seems very sensible. It costs me less than ten pounds to buy a Hilary Mantel novel—why would I pay three or four pounds a month to read serialised fiction on a blog? Dr. Arnold’s sermon of 1837, when he warned the boys of Rugby School against the new evil of serialised fiction, focussed on the “drop by drop” approach of keeping people hooked on this new “evil” which encouraged them to be obsessed with the stories for a long period of time “affording frequent matter for conversation.” Though he was trying to oppose serialised fiction, Arnold’s assessment of its attractions surely has merit, and concurs with the current discussion about what would bring in more fiction readers to Substack. But the fiction he complained about was relatively cheap.
Look at Dr. Arnold’s comments again and it is obvious what mode of storytelling has taken over the drop by drop approach and affords “frequent matter for conversation.” Television serials. First HBO, then Netflix, became our new serialised fiction. I remember when everyone had seen Game of Thrones and I was greeted with the sort of incredulity usually reserved for those people who have never heard of the moon landing when it became obvious in the office that I had no idea what “Winter is coming” meant. Arnold’s drop-by-drop description was meant to invoke the idea of fiction as a drug like laudanum, and we routinely describe digital media in similar terms, with all of our loosely defined talked of serotonin and endorphins and the like.
And it seems to me that the books which ought to succeed on Substack are prospering elsewhere.
Brandon Sanderson is the author most well-known for his crowdfunding model today, which raises him millions and millions and millions of dollars. But that works because people are willing to pay a lot of money for a set of nicely bound books. (The product range on that page goes from a $10 audiobook up to a $650 set of leather bound books in covers.) If anyone was going to make serialisation work, it is surely Sanderson, who has a huge, dedicated audience, and who writes a lot of words every year. But his model is closer to the old pre-serialisation model, when publishers like John Murray produced gorgeous and expensive sets of Byron for the well-off.
Serialised fiction tended to be bundled with other things: stories were published alongside journalism. Dickens wasn’t just a genius novelist, he was a journalist and editor. The Sherlock Holmes stories were published in the Strand, which also had puzzles and other articles. Like HBO and Netflix, they were a bundle. You could get a whole range of dopamine/laudanum hits drop-by-drop. Brandon Sanderson doesn’t do this because his audience wants nice physical books. The decline of Strand and others was brought on by the extension of entertainment options. An edition of All the Year Round would furnish a family with Dickens’ fiction to be read aloud, but also many other forms of interest and entertainment.
The rise of short fiction which coincided with commuting may be a beneficial example. Serialisation was good for very long novels, but commuting brought more demand for short stories and novellas, hence Sherlock Holmes. But as with the long novel, this still works as part of a bundle. Something like would be a good starting point for fiction publishing on Substack, but then we hit the question of quality. What sort of fiction would work well in a publication like that?
Many people know the much repeated story of the harbour at New York which was full of people awaiting the last instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop. The waiting crowd called out to the approaching ship to tell them what happened. On news of Little Nell’s death, many of them fainted. But remember: Tolstoy stopped serialising War & Peace. He wanted to revise it too much. And he didn’t think sales were good enough. So he started publishing in volumes. Serialisation doesn’t work for every novel, or for every author.
And how many of the best novels of the last twenty four years would you have wanted to read over a period of months? Not being able to read a Sally Rooney book in one go would drive me mad. We are used to a much less baggy form of fiction these days. And it was always hard for authors like Tolstoy to build an audience through serialisation. War and Peace built its audience through volumes. (Middlemarch wasn’t serialised either.)
So we are left with the rather gloomy prospect that modern fiction is written to different formatting standards, read in different ways, and not easily bundled with other sorts of journalism—all of which makes the idea of serialised fiction on Substack seem a remote prospect. Ebooks have been very successful, as have audiobooks, which ought to give Substack an advantage, but they have to go alongside physical, which surely precludes Substack as a platform as it involves more work for the author and reader. Stephen King did a serialised novel once, but he published a series of small paperbacks. That’s not so far from Sanderson, drip-feeding his audience a series of instalments in different fantasy series (only across ebook, audio, paperback, and fancy leather bound editions). What does Substack have to add to this model at the margin? I suggest that it is perhaps not enough?
Maybe the internet unbundled everything too much to make the fiction model sustainable at a time when we already have so much serialised television. It is surely the case that fiction can be serialised on Substack, but the innovations are probably just as much required in the form of the fiction being written as in the technical specifications of the platform.
’s idea that it would come from a writer setting up fake accounts and having them act on the internet as characters is what I have long anticipated. But being able to keep track of multiple social media accounts within the confines of a narrative asks a lot of your audience, who can in fact watch as much social media beef among anon accounts as they like without the fuss of a larger plot they need to manage.
However, this is where I think Substack does have an advantage. Imagine if the old epistolatory novels, which caused such sensation in the eighteenth century, had been not published in volumes but posted to your house. The thrill of finding a new instalment of Pamela arriving as if the letter had been written for you relaying the latest gossip of the plot would surely have been quite fabulous. Imagine, today, you had a friend who kept relaying some juicy gossip about her co-workers or neighbours or friends. Every few days you would wake up to a new audio message on WhatsApp about what they had been up to. She would forward you their private emails or messages. And link to their passive aggressive social posts which would make a lot more sense once you knew the dirty secrets in the background.
As remind me, one writer who would do well at this is Maria Semple, who wrote the very wonderful novel Where’d You Go, Bernadette? which is not only a very good novel about artistic life, having a mid-life crisis, and what it is like to work in an office (Microsoft in this case), but is also has splendid use of things like email. If you haven’t read it, please do.
Substack is something like a postal service. It is probably currently too much like a magazine to be quite right for this. But if they can find a way of allowing people to sign up for the whole immersive experience of receiving a novel that is written across various media, all pulled together in one gossipy narrative, that might be the breakthrough that written fiction has been waiting for. It would meet all of the criteria: a drop-by-drop approach that kept people talking about the story. And it would make use of the new methods of communication, just as epistolatory novel once did.
If any fiction writers out there have a wonderfully gossipy story to tell, this might be a good experiment to try.
I recently acquired a novel serialized on Substack and it will be reissued by Belt Publishing in April https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/substack-and-acquisition
The model for serialized fiction on Substack exists, and it's sustainable, because it's been popular since the dawn of the phenomenon that engendered it: fanfiction.
The concept of Internet serialization stems directly from print serialization in the form of fan magazines and zines of mid-century Trekdom. Its re-birth online and subsequent assimilation into mainstream consumption of popular media has meant that it is often THE only way some people read long form writing at all (I know, from being on the front lines and meeting people who said they haven't picked up a book in years in favor of the easy access to their favorite characters). I come from an intersection of two worlds, and though I'm integrating myself into a more pluralistic, intellectually oriented sphere, fanfiction was where I cut my teeth in everything I'm practicing now.
I'm not sure what the popular view of fanfiction is to Substackers writ large, but I know for a fact people would pay top dollar for fanfiction if fanfiction wasn't an inherently free enterprise due to its origins in copyrighted material. And of course, that's the problem in gaining an audience for serialized original fiction: fanfiction exists on the backs of existing IP. Even when that IP is little more than an obscure literary text that's fallen out of copyright (fandoms do exist for small niches, despite the popular view of fandom nerds falling into about ten different accepted camps; hi, I'm a recovering former Superwholockian! Commiserate with me?) it still technically creates that connection automatically, which is something I actually criticized in my recent piece Three Cheers for Sweet Reluctance. The further away a story veers from the "canonical" story and characters, the less reads it generally receives.
There are exceptions to that rule, of course, but I am speaking from experience. My most popular fanfictions for my fandom were ones that played directly into popular fandom tropes and pairings. When I tried to be experimental and create original characters interacting with the story I loved, or tried to do something artistic with the material, it was always crickets.
And fanfiction itself is often derided for being that derivative, even though (if you're canonical enough) some of the best writing I've ever had the pleasure of reading has been from fanfiction authors. At the beginning of this century, when Anne Rice discovered how her fans had "taken" her beloved Lestat and put him in situations she never dreamed about, she very publicly denounced fanfiction and pursued legal action against their writers (as a fan of her work, I'm honestly glad she's finally passed; The Vampire Chronicles are having a new renaissance in the AMC series, and it's basically everything she would have HATED in an adaptation; vindication for the fandom!!!)
I think there are two sides to this equation that seem mutually opposed to each other, but actually could work together if one reframed this way: fanfiction is considered derivative and only for juvenile "fandoms," and yet the popularity of fanfiction itself proves that the model for serialized fiction works; original fiction is considered unique, but harder to find an audience for-- but lets be honest here... is anyone of us NOT influenced by what we consume and, more importantly, think critically on? Some of the most celebrated works of literature are, in essence, fanfictions where someone saw so much potential in a story that they had to play around in that universe. One of the best-selling books of this year (and one of the best contemporary books I've read in some time), James, is essentially fanfiction on its basest level. That it was elevated by the author's prolific reputation and his recent bump due to the film American Fiction is beside the point. David Copperfield, as retold by Barbara Kingsolver, won the Pulitzer Prize last year. There is a market for literary fanfiction, and it's honestly one of my favorite genres to read.
Perhaps the way into this whole field of serialized fiction is to EMBRACE the model that already works. Can we serialize "fanfiction" based on our favorite classic texts that inspire us, and make us want to expound on their themes in a critical and literary way? Can that help build the audience that we need for future, more original endeavors? There are several ideas for novels I've had based on my old fandom that I wish I could publish traditionally. We can't necessarily write paid-for fanfiction for things still in copyright, but who's to say a fictional retelling/retooling of Gatsby wouldn't do absolute GANGBUSTERS on this platform (especially taking into account criticism of the actual book that has been floating around; why not improve upon it in this Substackian playground?)?