A New Book Launch Every Week

Sustained promotion when writing a long-form serial.

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Jul 10, 2024

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This week’s guest post comes courtesy of

Simon K Jones

, a prolific writer of serial science fiction and fantasy stories. As someone who’s beginning to dabble in online serialised fiction myself, I was keen to get Simon’s perspective on the process. I know you’ll find this piece incredibly useful, too.

Publication day finally rolls around, your book is released to the world and all of your promotional efforts pay off. You ride the wave for as long as possible, bolstering sales through talks and interviews and promos, but it’s never quite as big as the launch day. The book sells, or it doesn’t.

And then it’s all over, your book moves into the backlist, and you crack on with the multi-year journey towards your next release. Unless someone influential on TikTok rediscovers your book, it’s unlikely to have another launch moment.

That’s not how I’ve been doing it. I’ve been writing serial fiction for a decade, first on Wattpad and more recently via my Write More newsletter. I send out a new chapter every week to my readers, and my stories play out over months or even years. My current serial, Tales from the Triverse, began in 2021 and is still going – readers who were there in the beginning have come along for the ride, reading and commenting and sharing. Keeping up a kind of momentum requires continual iteration and the trying of new ideas.

Every week is a new mini-launch; a new opportunity to reach new readers. For context, I just hit 4,000 subscribers having started from near-nothing in 2021, with a slow-but-steady approach that has been effective as well as creatively satisfying. I’ve never been especially interested in rapid growth-at-all-costs, and prefer to write what I want to write.

Therefore this isn’t going to be how to get to ten thousand readers in five minutes. But if you’d like to know how to develop a healthy writing habit and connect with readers over a longer period, read on.

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The slow early days

I’d always had a Mailchimp newsletter with a sign-up form on my Wordpress website, but had never really used it. Mailchimp pushes towards corporate-style mailings, which never felt like the right fit. Over about ten years I’d accumulated 100 probably quite confused subscribers.

When I switched to using Substack in 2021, I was effectively starting from scratch.

In other words, I needed to get the word out.

More than fiction

This will be a tricky suggestion for some fiction writers, many of whom will quite reasonably want to focus on writing fiction. I knew growing a subscriber list for fiction would be a tough call: I’m not a household name, and fiction is a hard gig even when you have a major publisher backing you up.

I’ve always enjoyed behind-the-scenes information from creators, whether that’s for movies, books, TV, comics, games or anything else. That’s naturally led to me being quite happy to share my process and experiences as a writer. I made the decision from the start to have two sides to the newsletter: the fiction and the non-fiction, where I’d write about writing serials.

I was writing for myself and people like me: who love fiction but are also intrigued by the process. Many of these readers would also be writers, but that wasn’t a problem. In fact, it would prove to be an asset.

The theory was that the ‘how to’ articles would grow the list, and then some of those people would discover and enjoy the fiction. The ongoing publilcation of Tales from the Triverse also served as proof that I knew what I was talking about, and wasn’t another writing guru with lots of confidence but no actual books.

Social media

Back when I published on Wattpad, around 2015, it was much easier to post links to your work across social platforms like Twitter and Facebook and have people a) see the posts and b) click on them. By 2021, when I was shifting everything over to my own newsletter, it was already becoming more difficult.

This was back when I still used Twitter a lot. I had stopped using Facebook in a personal capacity a couple of years earlier, but I still had an ‘author page’. And so I shared everything I posted to both of them. I sometimes used Canva to put together fancy thumbnails to make the links more appealing.

There were already signs that social media was on the way out, even before Musk imploded Twitter. Very few of my 1,500 Twitter followers ever saw my tweets. In that first year, starting mid-2021, Twitter brought in just shy of 300 views to the newsletter, Facebook less than 200. Reddit and LinkedIn contributed less than 100 each.

Crucially, though, the combined number of actual subscribers from all social sources was nine. Nine people. It wasn’t worth the time I’d spent sharing and talking about my work on socials.

Even back then, social media was largely a waste of time unless you could do it on a massive scale, and even then it had diminishing returns.

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Bookfunnel

Most of my subscriptions at the start came from Bookfunnel, a platform for writers which makes it easy to team up and combine newsletter reach. I had a back catalogue of completed books, so was able to offer one of those as a reader magnet, in exchange for a subscription.

Bookfunnel isn’t free, but it isn’t expensive. I paid about $10 per month and always saw tangible benefits from the promos. In total, over the course of a year-and-a-half, using BookFunnel brought in 1,100 subscribers. It built a strong foundation.

Crucially, if someone liked the reader magnet there was a good chance they’d also like the fiction I was sending out.

It works out to something like $0.16 per subscriber, which I was pretty happy with. I doubt running ads would have been as successful and I’d definitely have felt more grubby.

Old fashioned networking

In 2021 Substack was already four years old, but everything felt very new and bootstrapped. Everyone was still figuring out what went where and how everything worked.

There were a couple of incubator/training programmes I joined which introduced me to a bunch of writers who would go on to be quite influential in the newsletter space. I also joined Fictionistas, a community-led fiction community on Substack that had its own newsletter and Discord server. This was all about meeting interesting people and exploring what could be done with the newsletter format.

I’m still in touch with a lot of those people. The networking wasn’t about driving subscriptions, but building a foundation of peers to learn from. As we each grew our readerships, we could point to each other and share in the success.

It was slow but steady. After a year, by mid-2022, I’d reached 800 subscribers. A huge leap from anything I’d done before in terms of a personal newsletter, but I wasn’t sure whether it was sustainable, especially as I was beginning to sense that I’d exhausted the potential of Bookfunnel.

The tipping point

It was around this time that three elements converged that significantly accelerated my newsletter’s growth.

Recommendations

I’d chosen to use Substack because it had an easy, slick interface that got out of the way and prioritised writing. This turned out to be a better choice than I’d initially realised, as Substack wasn’t content with simply being a newsletter delivery service. One of the earliest features they added was recommendations.

It is a simple idea that’s shown up in other contexts for decades. It made it very easy for a Substack newsletter to recommend another Substack newsletter and have that be visible through the general infrastructure and reader journey.

This is when those contacts I made in the first year, those manual networking efforts, suddenly started to pay off. Over 200 publications have recommended mine, contributing over 1,000 subscribers who I might otherwise never have met.

Being plugged into the wider fiction writing community started to lift all of us up: this was already happening naturally to a degree, but the built-in recommendations feature added rocket fuel.

Back catalogue

At the same time, I’d been writing the newsletter for over a year. I was sending out two newsletters each week: one with my fiction, one with non-fiction writing tips. After a year of consistent writing, this meant that I had a significant back catalogue of posts.

This is invaluable: the way modern newsletter systems work, such as Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv and others, it’s really easy to find and read previous editions. Unlike Mailchimp, which isn’t really intended to exist as an archive, or a Wordpress blog, which isn’t really intended to be sent out as a newsletter, these newer services are combining the two concepts together.

As such, when a new reader arrived at my newsletter’s website, or clicked through from an email they’d been forwarded by a friend, they were presented with a wealth of interesting reading material. Any kind of back catalogue is a valuable asset to an author, and in the case of a newsletter it serves as proof that you know what you’re talking about, and that you’re in it for the long haul. Especially with serial fiction, the reader needs to have confidence that you’re not going to abandon the project halfway through.

Increasingly I was able to link internally to my earlier articles, making the value of the newsletter very clear to new subscribers. It was a growing body of work, making it ever-more appealing to newcomers.

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Organic search

At some point in the second year I started to see an increasing number of readers discovering the newsletter through organic search. My more practical newsletters were answering key writing questions, and Google was serving up my articles at the top of search results.

I should emphasise that this was not a planned thing. It was not part of an SEO strategy. I just wrote the stuff I wanted to write, which was designed to be useful, and that in turn connected with readers and search algorithms. As an increasing number of people found my articles, they would then share and link to them, further boosting the search ranking.

Chasing organic search or trying to game the system can be a weary and soul destroying exercise; but it’s nice when it happens naturally. I suppose that’s what ‘organic’ was supposed to mean, back before it was hijacked by marketers.

It’s worth adding a note of caution here: with the arrival of generative AI, the days of organic search results may well be coming to an end. Google doesn't want you to leave their ecosystem, just as Meta doesn't want you to click a link and leave Instagram or Facebook, and X doesn’t want you to ever stop scrolling. They need the ad revenue. This is bad for writers and potentially bad for readers – but maybe we’ll learn to not overly rely on these corporate-run services in the future, and find a way to build better systems for individuals and people.

Presentation & onboarding

I write long-form serials. When I used to publish via Wattpad, a lot of the user experience was taken care of for me. That’s not the case with Substack, which is built primarily for individual articles and non-fiction (this is likely to change over time – I wouldn’t be surprised to see some significant shifts in the next 18 months).

Not a problem when I started publishing Tales from the Triverse. It started with one chapter, after all. Each week the story grew - still not a major issue for the first half dozen chapters, but after that I realised that a serial told over multiple newsletters was difficult to navigate if you weren’t there from the start. Even with the web version of the newsletter, it was impenetrable for potential new readers. Imagine finding a book in a library, but the pages have been torn out and hidden around the room.

It was around this time that I created an ‘index’ for the book, presenting it in ‘seasons’ and ‘episodes’, and borrowing a lot of terminology from television. It became much easier to understand the concept and jump on board.

Riding the wave

All of these activities, some planned and some not, combined to give the newsletter steady growth. I hit 4,000 subscribers in June 2024, which is more than I ever expected.

My paid subscriber growth is considerably slower, but even that started shifting in mid-2023, accelerating to a point where my writing is now bringing in some decent pocketmoney. Again, not something I had expected or really anticipated. There’s real potential in this space for fiction writers.

The acceleration in 2023 was aided by another new Substack feature:

Notes

Substack Notes launched in April 2023, initially appearing to be a Twitter clone/alternative. I was wary at first, given that I’d only recently managed to wean myself off Twitter itself. After dipping a tentative toe, it turned out that Notes was delivering a very different experience, despite superficial appearances.

The key thing is that the people you see on Notes are based on the (Substack) newsletters to which you subscribe. Given that I read a lot of fiction writers, my Notes experience is reminiscent of attending a vibrant book club in someone’s front room, or a writing group meet-up down the pub.

I don’t scroll endlessly on Notes, because the first thing I see is usually of interest.

Notes is a very engaged crowd of writers and readers – remember, all writers are also readers – and it’s proved a highly effective way to find more subscribers. I don’t need to post endlessly or game the algorithm: I just take part in discussions and occasionally share something of interest, and some people take notice. It feels healthier, so far.

Substack isn’t without its flaws. It could well jump the shark or be bought by a rich, mad American at some point in the future. But that’s OK – I can take my subscribers with me to another service, like Ghost or Beehiiv or Buttondown. For now, though, Substack is proving to be a powerful partner.

What next?

Uncertainty is a constant companion for all creative people. Right now, there’s a sense that everything is in a state of flux, with the digital distribution and promotion models from the last decade collapsing and AI intruding into every crevice.

As of mid-2024, Substack remains the most exciting online platform for writers that I’ve ever been part of; and yet I’m also acutely aware that it could very easily disappear in a puff of tech bro smoke. We’ve seen it happen too many times. Unlike all the other platform implosions, though, this time I have control over my audience and content and can take them with me if I need to move. That’s more of a game-changer than it should be.

Crucially, I haven’t had to change what I write or contort myself to fit into a shape demanded by a hostile algorithm. A weekly newsletter allows me to just be me.

I simply write the stuff I would want to be writing anyway, and people are showing up. That’s a new and exciting reality that’s previously been maddeningly elusive for writers. It’s a glimpse of what the internet could be, if we keep nudging it in the right direction.

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