Good luck with it all, Mark! I completely understand that desire to write about a wide range of ideas, which doesn't always fit into how online reading works. This sounds like a sensible approach, although it also sounds like a lot of work!
The question of whether serialised works need to be written with that in mind is a topic I find endlessly fascinating. My work definitely tends towards an episodic structure, to the point that I have the opposite challenge - when the finished work is compiled into something more like a book, I suspect the pacing and regular chapter lengths probably feel rather enforced. That said, I've had readers come to the books after their initial serial run and they seem to get on with them fine.
I wonder whether serial -> novel is an easier route than novel - > serial. The former results in a pacey, probably slightly pulpy novel, which a lot of people like, whereas the latter can feel more like a constantly interrupted novel.
Thanks. I think it would be reasonable to distinguish three distinct art forms: the pure serial, which is fundamentally episodic and lacks any overall arc; the novel, which contains episodes only as a means of building the overall arc; and the episodic novel, which contains episodes but which also has an overall arc to which each episode contributes.
It would follow that a pure serial will never make a novel. This would explain why so many beloved TV serials have unsatisfactory endings. You can't conclude an arc that was never their in the first place.
It would also follow that a pure novel will be awkward to serialize. The episodes will not have sufficient independence to support wide gaps in reading.
But am episodic novel should work in both formats. I'm guessing that your work is of this kind, but mine is not.
I was interested in your comments on your book. The approach I choose to take is to publish experts from my book on my Substack with the hopes of build buzz until I launch the book in the fall.
I agree with you decision the downsides of serializing books here on Substack. Because you can purchase a kindle version of a book for a few buck, that seems to be the best reader experience.
I have no idea how this thing will go with my book, it will be my first experience at self publishing too. Perhaps we can stay in contact and share experience with out books on Amazon. We could do it privately via email if you wish, but of course no pressure intended.
Now I will go over to Amazon and purchase you book.
I have yet to see anything resembling buzz for my books, but I suspect that comes with later releases if the earlier ones become popular. Or from being famous already.
Happy to stay in contact. A reply to my newsletter email will reach me.
Thanks for sharing your thinking Mark. I’m going to subscribe to your transcontinental trip musings (as I suspect I’ll be doing one of these myself at some point). I do want to challenge a bit of your thinking about variety, however. You wrote: “Most of you won’t be interested in all the things I want to write about, though, and if you get too many posts that don’t interest you, you might unsubscribe.” I think what makes a Substack interesting is not that the author writes about what interests me, but that they write about what interests them deeply. If that’s variety, let it be variety! This reader doesn’t need to dig very post--it’s easy enough to delete the ones I don’t. But I want to hear from people who think and explore differently than me, not from writers who are overeager to conform to some conception of what they should be writing to “keep” an audience.
Thanks Tom. I do find it an interesting question, the extent to which people follow a subject vs an author. In some sense, the approach I am taking is an experiment in that very question. In a year or so, I will compare the subscriber lists from the three newsletters.
Will the other two lists be a subset of the subscribers of Stories All the Way Down? In that case, using sections in Stories All the Way Down would have sufficed.
Will the other two lists be broadly distinct from Stories All the Way Down? Then I am attracting readers more by subject.
Will the three lists be broadly similar? Then I needn't have bothered to separate them. I can, of course, consolidate them if that is the case.
If I get an interesting answer to this question, I'll let you know here.
The other aspect of this, though, is that all of the places that support newsletter discovery do so by topic, so having different newsletters on different topics has some capacity to reach new audiences. That is the hope anyway.
Not sure if I will put in the effort necessary to track if subscribers coming to the new newsletters will migrate over to Stories All the Way Down or not, but that would be an interesting thing to know two.
Yeah, these are interesting questions. I recently created a section for my fiction--but I wonder if it should be a separate newsletter? I’ll be watching your experiment closely, and I would hope that Substack product managers would be too, and will help all authors to see what they learn. As a person who prefers writing on eclectic topics, I guess it’s no surprise that’s what I’d choose to read ... but no reason to think that others would feel the same.
I have a slight preference for your plan to host 3 separate newsletters. I know I'll be subscribing to 2 of them but not the other, so splitting them up will make that easy for me. On the other hand, I'm used to ignoring posts I don't care about on all the other other blogs I read, so it wouldn't be much of a hassle for me to do the same here if they all came through the same channel.
Thanks. Interestingly, I've had the more unsubs as a result of this post than any other I have ever written. Maybe that is the blog people who I brought over unsubbing because they had forgotten they were ever subscribed to the blog. Maybe it was a response to my intention not to serialize another novel, though that would be odd since it will mean the miss the last chapter of The Wistful and the Good. Or maybe it is something else. One never quite knows. But I have also picked up a number of subs to the new newsletters, so that is encouraging.
Best of luck with your new projects! I'd definitely be interested in The Anomalous Now and maybe the travel blog. You always have a unique insight into the topics you tackle, and I'm generally up for reading whatever you write. My interests are pretty diverse, too!
As for divining the magic formula for converting free subscribers to paid, I can't be of much help. But, I think it makes sense to offer premium content for those who do pay. It sounds like you have a good plan to encompass a variety of preferences.
Thanks. The Anomalous Now posts are fun to write. I have a number of them in the pipeline. As for paid, we'll see. Not even sure if I want to go that way yet.
Good luck with it all, Mark! I completely understand that desire to write about a wide range of ideas, which doesn't always fit into how online reading works. This sounds like a sensible approach, although it also sounds like a lot of work!
The question of whether serialised works need to be written with that in mind is a topic I find endlessly fascinating. My work definitely tends towards an episodic structure, to the point that I have the opposite challenge - when the finished work is compiled into something more like a book, I suspect the pacing and regular chapter lengths probably feel rather enforced. That said, I've had readers come to the books after their initial serial run and they seem to get on with them fine.
I wonder whether serial -> novel is an easier route than novel - > serial. The former results in a pacey, probably slightly pulpy novel, which a lot of people like, whereas the latter can feel more like a constantly interrupted novel.
Thanks. I think it would be reasonable to distinguish three distinct art forms: the pure serial, which is fundamentally episodic and lacks any overall arc; the novel, which contains episodes only as a means of building the overall arc; and the episodic novel, which contains episodes but which also has an overall arc to which each episode contributes.
It would follow that a pure serial will never make a novel. This would explain why so many beloved TV serials have unsatisfactory endings. You can't conclude an arc that was never their in the first place.
It would also follow that a pure novel will be awkward to serialize. The episodes will not have sufficient independence to support wide gaps in reading.
But am episodic novel should work in both formats. I'm guessing that your work is of this kind, but mine is not.
I was interested in your comments on your book. The approach I choose to take is to publish experts from my book on my Substack with the hopes of build buzz until I launch the book in the fall.
I agree with you decision the downsides of serializing books here on Substack. Because you can purchase a kindle version of a book for a few buck, that seems to be the best reader experience.
I have no idea how this thing will go with my book, it will be my first experience at self publishing too. Perhaps we can stay in contact and share experience with out books on Amazon. We could do it privately via email if you wish, but of course no pressure intended.
Now I will go over to Amazon and purchase you book.
Thank you!
I have yet to see anything resembling buzz for my books, but I suspect that comes with later releases if the earlier ones become popular. Or from being famous already.
Happy to stay in contact. A reply to my newsletter email will reach me.
Thanks for sharing your thinking Mark. I’m going to subscribe to your transcontinental trip musings (as I suspect I’ll be doing one of these myself at some point). I do want to challenge a bit of your thinking about variety, however. You wrote: “Most of you won’t be interested in all the things I want to write about, though, and if you get too many posts that don’t interest you, you might unsubscribe.” I think what makes a Substack interesting is not that the author writes about what interests me, but that they write about what interests them deeply. If that’s variety, let it be variety! This reader doesn’t need to dig very post--it’s easy enough to delete the ones I don’t. But I want to hear from people who think and explore differently than me, not from writers who are overeager to conform to some conception of what they should be writing to “keep” an audience.
Thanks Tom. I do find it an interesting question, the extent to which people follow a subject vs an author. In some sense, the approach I am taking is an experiment in that very question. In a year or so, I will compare the subscriber lists from the three newsletters.
Will the other two lists be a subset of the subscribers of Stories All the Way Down? In that case, using sections in Stories All the Way Down would have sufficed.
Will the other two lists be broadly distinct from Stories All the Way Down? Then I am attracting readers more by subject.
Will the three lists be broadly similar? Then I needn't have bothered to separate them. I can, of course, consolidate them if that is the case.
If I get an interesting answer to this question, I'll let you know here.
The other aspect of this, though, is that all of the places that support newsletter discovery do so by topic, so having different newsletters on different topics has some capacity to reach new audiences. That is the hope anyway.
Not sure if I will put in the effort necessary to track if subscribers coming to the new newsletters will migrate over to Stories All the Way Down or not, but that would be an interesting thing to know two.
Yeah, these are interesting questions. I recently created a section for my fiction--but I wonder if it should be a separate newsletter? I’ll be watching your experiment closely, and I would hope that Substack product managers would be too, and will help all authors to see what they learn. As a person who prefers writing on eclectic topics, I guess it’s no surprise that’s what I’d choose to read ... but no reason to think that others would feel the same.
I have a slight preference for your plan to host 3 separate newsletters. I know I'll be subscribing to 2 of them but not the other, so splitting them up will make that easy for me. On the other hand, I'm used to ignoring posts I don't care about on all the other other blogs I read, so it wouldn't be much of a hassle for me to do the same here if they all came through the same channel.
Good luck with your future writing!
Thanks. Interestingly, I've had the more unsubs as a result of this post than any other I have ever written. Maybe that is the blog people who I brought over unsubbing because they had forgotten they were ever subscribed to the blog. Maybe it was a response to my intention not to serialize another novel, though that would be odd since it will mean the miss the last chapter of The Wistful and the Good. Or maybe it is something else. One never quite knows. But I have also picked up a number of subs to the new newsletters, so that is encouraging.
Best of luck with your new projects! I'd definitely be interested in The Anomalous Now and maybe the travel blog. You always have a unique insight into the topics you tackle, and I'm generally up for reading whatever you write. My interests are pretty diverse, too!
As for divining the magic formula for converting free subscribers to paid, I can't be of much help. But, I think it makes sense to offer premium content for those who do pay. It sounds like you have a good plan to encompass a variety of preferences.
Congratulations on your milestone!
Thanks. The Anomalous Now posts are fun to write. I have a number of them in the pipeline. As for paid, we'll see. Not even sure if I want to go that way yet.