Serialized Fiction Online
Is this experiment going to work or die on the vine?
A colleague, another writer, asked me the other day, “How’s that Substack thing going?”
I didn’t have a really good answer then. But now I do. Sort of.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
I know, a cliche. But it’s true. My serialized novel, Rainbow Man launched in January, 2022. I have a few hundred free subscribers/readers. Far less fully paid subscribers. But that’s okay. It’s going to take time. And I knew that going in. The goal is to get people to read this story.
Marathon, not a sprint.
It’s also an experiment that relies on a number of things, not the least of which is training avid readers that, yes, you can find good narratives in book length on the web.
Two things I’ve had to work on:
- Helping readers feel comfortable with this platform and the idea that chapters come over time, not all at once.
- Helping readers understand that, yes, you have to pay for it.
So much of what people read online is free. My book will not be free. The first chapters are a way to give listeners a chance to read the story a bit to see if it’s for them, like one might do with a physical book in a bookstore. But it’s not going to be free…
