I’ve been using Substack for years as as a nonfiction author, and while I have had a Substack for fiction for two years, I’ve not yet posted any content to it.

Why? Because I didn’t really understand how readers would read a story via email.

I’ve been feeling this out, and my suspicions were true—Elle Griffin (Novelleist), who is in the Top 10 of fiction Substackers, estimates that it takes about 5 chapters before the number of people subscribing drops off significantly. There is a threshold at which it becomes harder and harder to catch up on the story, and people stop bothering.

But I still want to make this work. I’m excited about many of the other great features of Substack and the ecosystem that the company has built, and it makes sense to repost content here if I’m already posting to Patreon, Ream, Kindle Vella, and more.

My 6-Part Initial Setup That I’m Testing

Based on my nonfiction experience, I’ve come up with six best practices that I think will work well for my fiction Substack—and that may work well for yours, too. Even if not all six apply to you and how your Author Ecosystem is set up, hopefully some will—and I’ve found that even after using Substack for years, there are still surprising features that I learn about as I go along.

Here it is:

#1 - Set It Up and Get Some Content Posted Before Inviting People To It

Because Substack emails subscribers every time you post, I think it can be helpful to get your books set up on the platform (with at least a few chapters) before you really get started. That way, you can post them quickly without worrying about harassing subscribers.

If you already have subscribers, that’s okay—you can always schedule out your posts so they don’t all drop at once! Still, I wouldn’t recommend more than one post a day, and I’d also suggest that you don’t want to break up stories by posting a chapter of one the first day, and chapter of another the second, and so on. Give people enough of the story to get hooked, then switch to a second story.

It is going to be far more convenient and faster to set up your Substack before inviting people to subscribe…And there is a hack for this in my third step if you have subscribers already and you want to still do this.

Substack has a long list of features, emails, and more that you can edit, turn on and off, and more, so I highly recommend check out the Settings section of your Substack. While you don’t need to explore everything in this section before launching, it can help to regularly go through it like a checklist and make sure you are utilizing Substack’s newest and greatest features.

#2 - Free Stories and Paid Stories

Because I’m trying to mix a bunch of different serialization business models and make it work in many places, I had to decide on which of my stories I would make completely free, and which I would have a strong boundary for myself around keeping behind a paywall.

You may have run into this if you are trying to write exclusive content on Vella and Radish while also dropping free content to Wattpad and Royal Road to get people to your paywalled content at Patreon, Substack, and Ream.

Whoa…I’m a little tired just thinking about it all!

For myself, it was easier to decide on free stories versus paid stories according to series.

I have a few series (a shifters reverse harem and a mafia dark romance) that I’ll be dropping to Kindle Vella and Radish, and paywalling at Patreon, Substack, Ream, and Circle. These stories will never be free on Wattpad, Medium, or anywhere else.

And then I have more series that will be part-free, part-paid. They won’t be able to go to Kindle Vella because the exclusivity terms just don’t work for me. Instead, I’ll use the Substack model of having many chapters of the beginning free to build an audience, while paywalling later chapters four weeks after they are published.

And then I have series that are going to be free everywhere. These series will hopefully drive readers to my other series, especially because they are all set in the same world and share characters and tropes. Many of them are cross-over series, too!

Whatever way you want to set it up, you’ll need to decide what is free content and what is paid content. On Substack, it helps to have about 50% of your content standalone and for free (at least upon initial publication) so that you can keep growing your subscription.

I felt that having a few strategic stories completely free would allow people to sample my work in a big way, get invested, and hopefully move to other stories.

#3 - Each Story is a sub-Substack

Technically, Substack offers what it calls Sections, but I find it hilarious to call them sub-Substacks for some reason! Essentially, you are able to create multiple sub-substacks within a Substack and can set them so that people have to subscribe to each one separately. This is a really useful way to get readers to opt-in only to the stories they are interested in receiving emails about. They can still read the stories online through their subscription, but they don’t have to get flooded with emails about them just because they signed up to one email list.

I have multiple stories, many set in the same world. I also have science fiction and romance stories that are a bit more experimental for me—new worlds, different characters—and it’s nice that I can host those projects all under one Substack, too, especially since many of the tropes are the same.

For me, this was the gamechanger that finally made it make sense in my mind to serialize on Substack. Until they added this feature and made it so people had to subscribe to individual sections, I couldn’t see how to maintain subscribers when my writing was all over the place and most people weren’t going to want to be bombarded by every story I was writing.

#4 - There is a Table of Contents for Every Story, Linked in the Header and Footer

There has to be an easy way to catch up on a story so that people can subscribe in the middle of it. This is a good use of the post header and post footer, so that readers can find the Table of Contents for the story and read all available chapters in order.

The Table of Contents can be created in an initial post that is then pinned to the top of the sub-Substack page.

You can also add a link to your sub-Substack in your main Substack header, so that people can find the various stories you are offering.

#5 - The Main List is Mostly About Me as an Author

With each story in its own container that must be subscribed to separately, the main list must be focused on driving people to those sub-Substacks. There are many ways to do that, but I think the first is writing about whatever is exciting to me in the moment. It could be sneak peeks about my life, it could be commentary on themes and tropes in my books, it could be whatever thought is flying through my head that day…

It could also be answers to questions about the series, like:

• How did you come up with the world?

• What is this character going to do next?

• What are some similar books to yours?

There are lots of opinions on how to essentially blog for fiction (which is what I’d be doing here). I think in many ways, anything goes. Readers read various authors for all sorts of reasons, and you can find readers anywhere. If it’s something you love to do, why not do it? Some of the blogs I’m most inspired by have no topic (like John Scalzi’s Whatever blog). Instead, they are focused on attracting people interested in similar things, which makes some sense if you are selling fiction that is related to the same topics!

On the nonfiction side, it took me about two years to figure out my best post structures. Every once in awhile, I experiment with something new to see how it goes. I don’t expect to have all the answers on this one, and I suspect I’ll have to try many things before finding the groove with this for fiction.

#6 - Short, Contained Stories are a Regular Feature on the Main List

Even with free stories, you should probably have some short, contained stories that are a regular feature on the main list. To me, these are a chapter length or less and not an excerpt (though that could work too). On the nonfiction side, readers are used to self-contained blog posts, and short stories are one way to do the same.

Short stories need to be strategic, in my opinion. The goal should still be to drive people to a specific sub-Substack story.

Another option, if you can’t write a story in 1500 words or so, is to do a 5000 word or 10,000 word story in five parts or fewer. Again, five chapters is about the point where signups stall. So you could have a short story in three parts and that will probably work decently, too.

While these stories will be short, they will not be a waste. You can always bundle them up and publish a book with them. And because they are stories designed to drive desire for specific larger stories/series, you know that your new book is going to be an incredible marketing tool for years to come.

Do you run a fiction Substack? What’s working for you, and which of these steps do you want to implement this month?