Reflections on writing a fantasy serial on Substack

"The novel is dead," they said. "You should write a serial."

Photo by Patrick Fore on Unsplash

The novel is dead. Serialization will become the new publishing method.

These are the words I read countless times. They were the reason I took the plunge into serialization on Substack.

Honestly, I don’t know what the truth is. Is the novel really dead? Is serialization all it’s cracked up to be?

Being a writer is hard. There’s no shortcut to success. And the truth of success is relative. Someone will make it big on Substack serializing their novel. Someone will make it big going through a Big 5 publisher. Someone makes thousands of dollars per month on Medium. Whether it happens to me or you is irrelevant.

For that person, what happened to them is the truth.

Posting a chapter a week instead of querying agents won’t magically make your book sell. It will get it out in front of people much faster, but that’s almost the only thing that’s guaranteed.

I began writing my current novel in 2020. It’s gone through many iterations and edits. I rewrote the entire second draft from scratch and had it professionally edited in 2022. Now, as I go through round five of edits, it will soon be finished.

I re-launched my Substack in late August of this year. I wanted to give it a focus and schedule posts. What was posting on a whim about life in Japan, now turned into a fiction serialization and short stories.

Deciding that writing one novel wasn’t enough, I thought I would serialize a fiction piece from the same world as my novel. In my mind this was probably going to be a novella, but nothing longer than that. This work is The God Wars Saga.

I began with excitement and apprehension. Part of my serialization goal was to overcome my allergy to posting online and to combat my hardcore planner mindset. I was going to write weekly and see how it went.

Now, six weeks later, I have six “chapters” that make up the completed prologue of the story.

The problem is, this story has now become a saga in my mind, possibly spanning over ten books.

I realized that I probably can’t continue writing in this serialized form, and produce the story to the best of my ability. How did I get here?

The original note that inspired this article. Photo by author.

Well, I recently wrote a Note on my reflections. I wanted to dive into each point in more detail, hoping my journey can help someone with their own writing. 

My reflections are on the serialization of a novel that I wrote weekly, without writing much ahead of time.

Point #1

“If you’re not used to pantsing, weekly posts at a high level of writing are probably not going to go well. It likely won’t be your best work.”

I am usually a planner, but as mentioned above, wanted to take a different approach with my serial. To be honest, I looked at the serial as a ‘polished first draft.’ Which probably was a mistake in hindsight, at least in the larger scheme of Substack, but we will get to that.

Because of my planning tendencies, I am used to sitting with my chapters. Editing them, revising them. I am not one to put out the first draft of something on the internet. Especially not fiction, where the makeup of words on the page constitutes art.

Content creation and story writing are two different things. That being said, it felt like everyone else was doing it, so I thought, why not?

The novel’s dead, anyway, right?

Even through the six-week period, I already felt myself growing tired of the weekly schedule. It was hard to upkeep, especially when working on other projects. And six weeks is nothing compared to the amount of time other serials run for.

The other problem with writing weekly and treating the serial like a first draft is that many other fiction authors are serializing their full-blown, edited novels. In terms of quality, something that has been edited and mulled over is usually going to win. Readers then, also expect this type of quality from Substack publications. So, while I might have thought of this serial as a polished first draft, that probably wasn’t everyone’s expectation.

I hate to not put my best work out there, and while I am proud of the serial I created, I have to wonder what it might have been had I taken a few months to give it more care.

What I learned: A serial is only going to be as good as you make it. If you write the entire novel first, and then serialize it, the ROI is probably going to be higher. This is especially true since there are so many great serials out there that are just weekly post editions of fully fleshed out novels.

Point #2

“Writing one novel and trying to serialize another is not the best idea. (I don’t know why I thought it would be…) I had a plan and an outline, but writing weekly was still tough.

Things will naturally expand as you write. So finishing the work before serializing it stops you from running into the problem of contradiction, or coming up with a great idea later that you now can’t use.”

This one seems so blindingly obvious, but hear me out.

At first, this serial wasn’t a novel. It was just a story. But therein lies the problem. I didn’t know exactly what this serial was before I started, and once I figured it out, I realized that it probably wasn’t possible to keep up right now. This was a mistake. I should have had a clear vision of what I wanted the story to be — novel, novella, etc.

Now, while I didn’t write out everything and edit it before serializing it, I had a plan. I outlined the entire story and knew the major arcs and characters. The problem is, things still changed — a lot.

Despite my best efforts to think through everything, it just wasn’t possible to account for everything that I would come up with as I wrote.

What I learned: Writing is a process. No matter how skilled you are, you are going to come up with things as you write. In a serial that isn’t well planned out, this can come back to bite you. Also, probably don’t try to write two novels at once.

Point #3

“I am on my fifth edit of my non-serialized novel, so the quality difference between a weekly serial not written beforehand, and a polished book is going to be different no matter what.”

I don’t have a large following on Substack. While I rebranded in August and had some goals, I am still very much figuring out what it means to be a fiction writer (and Japan life writer) on Substack.

I don’t have a weekly Substack routine (i.e. like and comment on x amount of posts, write this many Notes, etc.), I just saw it as a place to write and put out my thoughts.

However, I think that in the serial fiction space, there are many people who view Substack as their publisher. They are putting their best work out there.

Knowing that, I felt a little embarrassed by my thought process in the beginning. I know I just “wanted to get it out there,” but at what cost? Even small Substacks get seen by the community in a way that a personal blog might not.

It’s your Substack, and you should do what you want with it, but upon second thought, I realized that I would have liked to spend a little more time with the story before posting originally. Maybe I would have foresaw some of the issues that would arise.

What I learned: Quality develops over time. People will define the quality of your writing by what you choose to put out there. Always try to leave the best impression.

Point #4

“However, I am happy I did it. I think it was a fun challenge for myself, and the most important thing is to write, right?

I probably ‘knew’ all of this before I started, but sometimes you have to just do it in order to learn.”

In a slight point of contradiction, however, I am happy I did it. It’s my Substack after all. I don’t think we should feel held hostage by what others are doing on any platform.

While I wish I had done some things differently, setting this serial in the same world as my novel gave me countless new ideas and built on the world of my novel in ways that wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t write it. For that alone, I think it was worth it.

If I do ever decide to serialize on Substack again, I would try to write and edit as much of the book as I could before I decide to post anything. For me at least, that is the best approach.

But like I said in my Note, sometimes you just have to do all of this before you can really understand it. I realize that making promises, such as a serial, and then shifting away from it is not a good look to your subscribers. The most successful Substacks have a clear vision and purpose and stick to it, providing the expected content at the expected intervals.

I am not discounting that. However, the whole point of the no-gatekeeper approach of something like Substack is to try different things and experiment. I think it’s okay to switch things up from time to time and try to write what really resonates with you.

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So, what was my takeaway? Is the novel dead? Should you serialize?

Maybe. Maybe not. Ask one-hundred different people and you’ll get one-hundred different answers.

But, you won’t ever know how something will go for you until you write it. In that way, I have no regrets about my short serialization journey.