Experimenting with Serial Publication

Serial publishing is one of the oldest and newest forms of content strategy, particularly for fiction. Dickens did it. Dumas did it. Salman Rushdie and Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk are signing up with Substack to serialize their next projects. I’m doing the same.

I am serializing my 8th-century historical novel, The Wistful and the Good,  on Substack. You can read the first chapter at https://gmbaker.substack.com/p/wag1 and you can subscribe to receive a new chapter by email each week.

This form of serialization is in its infancy, and different authors are taking different approaches to monetizing their content. Substack’s pitch to writers is that they can build a direct link to their reader with newsletters, and that writers can make money by charging for a subscription fee for some of their newsletter content. A number of authors, both fiction and non-fiction are exploring this model. Some, the better known non-fiction authors in particular, are apparently making a good living at it.

I’m more focused on attracting an audience and building a list right now, so subscriptions to The Wistful and the Good will be free. Besides the novel, I am also serializing a series of backgrounder posts discussing the historical background and literary issues behind the novel. The background posts are an experiment in differentiating my offering. Readers of historical fiction are often fascinated by the historical background and many historical novels include a note on the history. This approach allows me to do the same but on a much wider scale. There is an index of both the novel and the background posts here.

This is all an experiment. A content strategy experiment. It comes about because my deal with my intended publisher fell through, something I documented in a newsletter here. Starting a newsletter was actually the publisher’s idea and I struggled for a while to figure out what to do with it and to figure out what to do with my story-focused blog (Stories All the Way Down). The publishing deal falling through actually help resolve the problem of what to do with the blog and the newsletter.

Why serialize a novel? It is no secret that the economics of publishing are changing. People are looking for new models to distribute both fiction and non-fiction and for authors to earn money for their work. Substack represents one such new model, and so far it is doing well for itself and for some of its authors.

This is, of course, a form of self-publishing. I am not a fan of self publishing. It is not something I ever wanted to do. Publishing should have gate keepers. Not only are gatekeepers needed to sort the wheat from the tares, they are needed as custodians of our literary culture. Unfortunately, our current gatekeepers are falling down on the job. They have little care for literary culture, a pursuit now left to academics in whose hands it becomes an effete pursuit producing fiction of little popular appeal. But worse than this, the gatekeepers of publishing today are deliberately trying to narrow people’s reading tastes rather than broaden them.

Of course, in doing so, they are being good content strategists. They are maximizing the revenue from their content, and creating content from which they can most easily earn more revenue. The problem for authors is that this does little either for their bottom line, or for their art. In response, the author has to become a content strategist in their own right.

Building your own audience who you can contact directly through an email list and newsletter seems to be a sound content strategy for many authors. Building a relationship with your audience is, after all, one of the pillars of content strategy.

I thought I was retiring from content strategy when my interests turned to fiction. But it has become more and more clear to me that, whether they seek traditional publication or take an alternative route, authors today need to be content strategists. In publishing my novel this way, therefore, I get to exercise both of my interests. I will report on the content strategy aspects of the project here from time to time.

The interesting thing about publishing a newsletter is that you get feedback on things right away. I created a cover image, for purposes of giving the serial an identity. Graphic design is not among my greatest skills so I kept it simple, combining simple text with an image I found on Canva:

But because newsletters are an interactive media I am able to get feedback on every aspect of the project. One correspondent immediately suggested something like this:

Another correspondent suggested that the black and silver motif was not appealing enough and that the graphic did not represent the novel particularly well. This got me digging a little deeper into Canva’s stock photo selection (which, as you may imagine, is not heavily weighted towards imagery from the 8th century). However, illuminated manuscripts do play a significant role in the novel as a catalyst for several of its conflicts and attractions, so I searched for those and came up with this:

Which one would you be more likely to pick up on a bookstore shelf or click on in Amazon? (See, I’m doing A/B testing like a good content strategist).

Now to finish with a call to action: The Wistful and the Good is serializing on Substack. Please check it out at https://gmbaker.substack.com/p/wag1 and/or subscribe.