by Writing Workshops Staff
A month ago
Before Substack existed, before newsletters were a business model, before the internet itself — fiction already knew how to arrive in installments. Scheherazade kept a king awake (and herself alive) by ending each night's story at the moment of highest tension. Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers in twenty monthly parts and watched his subscriber count jump from four hundred to forty thousand over the run. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov in serialized chapters for The Russian Messenger, adjusting his pacing and digressions in response to reader letters that arrived between installments.
Serialization isn't a publishing hack. It's one of the oldest forms fiction takes, and it demands a specific set of craft skills that differ meaningfully from writing a novel intended to be read in a single sitting. If you're considering serializing your fiction on Substack — which now hosts over fifty million active subscriptions and has emerged as the dominant platform for independent serial fiction — the question isn't really about platform mechanics. It's about whether you understand the storytelling principles that have made serialized fiction work for centuries, and how to apply them in a digital context where your readers' attention is the most contested resource on earth.
The Chapter as a Complete Experience
The foundational mistake most writers make when serializing a novel is treating each installment as a fragment — a slice of a larger thing, incomplete on its own, meaningful only in aggregate. This misunderstands what serialization requires at the structural level. Every chapter in a serial must function as both a self-contained unit of satisfaction and an open door into the next installment. That's a genuinely difficult craft challenge, and it's worth studying how the best practitioners solve it.
Dickens understood this intuitively. Each monthly installment of his novels contained multiple chapter breaks, tonal shifts, and at least one scene that delivered a complete emotional experience — a comic set piece, a revelation, a confrontation that resolved even as it raised new questions. Readers of Bleak House didn't just get plot advancement each month. They got something that felt whole, a satisfying reading experience that also happened to end with unresolved threads pulling them toward the next installment.
Armistead Maupin achieved something similar with Tales of the City, which ran as a daily serial in the San Francisco Chronicle beginning in 1976. Each installment was roughly eight hundred words — barely longer than this section you're reading now. Yet Maupin managed to deliver character development, humor, and narrative momentum in those tight constraints because he treated each installment as a miniature story with its own arc, its own turn, its own reason for existing independent of what came before or after.
For Substack serializers, this principle translates directly. The ideal installment length for email delivery falls between 1,200 and 1,500 words — roughly a ten-minute read that sits comfortably within Gmail's 102KB truncation limit. But length matters far less than shape. A 1,500-word chapter that merely advances the plot by one beat, ending mid-scene with a cliffhanger, will eventually exhaust your readers. A 1,200-word chapter that delivers its own emotional arc — a moment of discovery, a shift in a relationship, a small reckoning — while also pointing forward? That's the unit of composition you're aiming for.
"The serial writer must learn to make each part a work in itself, yet leave an appetite for the next."
— Wilkie Collins, who serialized The Woman in White alongside Dickens in All the Year Round
Serial Pacing Is Not Novel Pacing
This is the craft distinction that separates writers who sustain a serial for months from those who abandon theirs after six weeks. A novel builds toward a single climactic peak through rising action — a long, ascending curve with strategic complications along the way. A serial operates on wave-like pacing: a rhythm of tension and release, mini-climaxes and breathing room, repeated across dozens of installments.
Think of it as the difference between a symphony and a television season. A symphony builds continuously toward a final movement. A great television season — The Wire, Breaking Bad, the first season of True Detective — delivers payoffs every episode while maintaining larger arcs that span the full run. Each episode has its own shape, its own reason to exist. The serial novelist needs to think like a showrunner, not just a novelist.
Stephen King's The Green Mile offers one of the clearest modern examples. Originally published as six serialized paperbacks in 1996, King structured each installment with its own dramatic question while building the overarching mystery of John Coffey's powers. The first installment focused on Coffey's arrival and the question of his nature. The second introduced the antagonist Percy Wetmore and his cruelty. Each part gave readers a complete dramatic experience — you could discuss that installment on its own merits — while leaving the larger story unresolved.
For your Substack serial, this means planning in arcs of ten to fifteen chapters rather than building a single three-act structure across your entire novel. Every arc should have its own inciting incident, its own escalation, its own payoff. A character relationship reaches a crisis point and resolves — only for a new complication to emerge. A mystery deepens, yields a partial answer, then reveals that the real question is something the reader hadn't yet considered. These structural beats create natural rhythm, prevent reader fatigue, and give you breathing room to rebuild your chapter buffer (which should stay at six to ten chapters ahead of publication).
Developing the pacing instincts that serial fiction demands takes practice and expert feedback. Our fiction workshops with published authors cover chapter structure, narrative momentum, and the art of the compelling ending.
Explore Fiction Workshops →Beyond the Cliffhanger: How Hooks Actually Work
The most common advice for serial fiction is to end every chapter on a cliffhanger. This advice is correct at the most superficial level and deeply wrong at the level that matters. Yes, you need to give readers a reason to return. But the relentless physical-danger cliffhanger — the gun is raised, the car swerves toward the cliff, the door opens to reveal — is actually one of the weakest forms of serialized suspense. It works once or twice. By the fifth time, readers feel manipulated rather than compelled.
The best serial fiction writers rotate between fundamentally different types of forward momentum. A chapter might end with a shocking revelation that reframes everything the reader thought they understood about a character. Another might close on a major decision point — not danger, but a fork in the road where the reader genuinely doesn't know which path the protagonist will choose. The most powerful serial endings are often emotional rather than physical: a relationship shifts, an internal wall cracks, a character says the thing they've been holding back for three chapters.
Scheherazade, the original serialist, understood this instinctively. Her stories-within-stories didn't always end at moments of physical peril. Some ended at moments of philosophical uncertainty, of moral ambiguity, of wonder. The king stayed awake not just because he needed to know what happened next, but because the story had opened a question in his mind that demanded resolution.
Study how this works in practice: Dostoevsky's serialized chapters of The Brothers Karamazov frequently end not on action beats but on psychological revelations — a character saying something that exposes the contradiction at their core. The reader returns not because they fear for anyone's safety but because they need to understand what that admission means. For your serial, aim for a mix. Physical suspense in perhaps one of every four or five chapters. Emotional and intellectual hooks the rest of the time. Your readers will stay more engaged over a longer run, and you'll avoid the exhaustion that comes from constant manufactured peril.
The First Three Chapters Carry Everything
Your opening installments bear a disproportionate burden in serial fiction. In traditional publishing, a reader who buys your novel has already committed — they've spent money, they'll give you fifty or a hundred pages to prove yourself. A Substack subscriber has committed nothing. They can unsubscribe with a single click, and your next installment competes for attention with every other email in their inbox on publication day.
This means your first three chapters must accomplish what a traditional novel's first three chapters do — establish voice, character, world, and stakes — while also demonstrating the specific pleasures of your serial. The reader needs to understand not just what your story is about but what the experience of following it will feel like. Will there be humor alongside the tension? Philosophical depth alongside the plot? A distinctive prose voice that makes the reading itself a pleasure, independent of what happens next?
These opening chapters also serve as your primary reader magnet. Distribute them freely across every platform where your potential audience gathers. They should be strong enough to function as standalone short fiction — compelling, complete in their emotional impact, and utterly distinctive in voice — while also creating an irresistible pull toward chapter four.
Voice as Subscription: Why Readers Stay
Here's something that platform-strategy guides rarely discuss: in serial fiction, voice is your retention mechanism. Plot keeps readers curious about what happens next. Voice is what makes them want to spend time with you regardless of what happens. The distinction matters enormously over a six-month or year-long serial run, because there will be quiet chapters — chapters that develop character, deepen world-building, lay groundwork for future payoffs. If your readers are only there for plot, those chapters will lose them. If they're there for your voice, those chapters become some of the most valued installments you publish.
Maupin's Tales of the City readers didn't just want to know what happened to Mary Ann Singleton and Michael "Mouse" Tolliver. They wanted to inhabit Maupin's San Francisco, to experience his particular blend of warmth and wit and melancholy. Dickens's serialized readers weren't just tracking the plot of David Copperfield — they were showing up for the pleasure of Dickens's sentences, his comic timing, his ability to make a scene feel both larger than life and intimately real.
The recent phenomenon of Dracula Daily — which re-serialized Bram Stoker's Dracula by sending excerpts to subscribers on the dates they occur in the novel — illustrates this beautifully. Tens of thousands of readers subscribed to a story whose plot they already knew. They stayed for the experience of receiving it in installments, for the community that formed around shared reading, and for the voice of the original text arriving fresh in their inboxes alongside the mundane emails of daily life.
For your own serial, this means investing heavily in the quality and distinctiveness of your prose voice. It means treating the narrator's sensibility as a character unto itself — one your readers develop a relationship with over months. And it means the quiet chapters, the ones without plot fireworks, need to be among your best-written installments. They're the chapters that prove your serial is worth following for the voice alone.
Developing a sustained, distinctive voice across a long project is one of the hardest things a fiction writer can do — and one of the most rewarding. Our IndieMFA programs provide the sustained mentorship and structured feedback that help writers find and strengthen their voice over months, not just a single workshop.
Learn About IndieMFA Programs →Building the Machine: Platform Strategy That Serves the Work
The craft comes first. But craft without an audience is a manuscript in a drawer, and Substack provides specific tools that — when used thoughtfully — can help your fiction find readers without requiring you to become a full-time marketer.
The platform's internal discovery ecosystem has matured significantly. Substack Notes, the platform's short-form social layer, now drives a substantial share of new subscriptions for fiction writers — particularly those who use it to share genuine writing-process insights rather than promotional content. The distinction matters. A Note that reads "New chapter dropping tomorrow!" is advertising. A Note that shares a genuine craft problem you encountered while writing that chapter — how you struggled to end the scene, what revision taught you, why you cut a character you loved — is content that builds trust with potential readers while demonstrating the kind of thoughtfulness that makes someone want to subscribe.
Cross-recommendations between complementary Substack publications have become another powerful growth channel. Fiction serializers who actively read and engage with other writers in their genre — restacking their posts, leaving substantive comments, participating in collaborative events — build organic networks that funnel readers between publications. This is the Substack equivalent of literary community, and it works because it's genuine rather than transactional.
A few practical considerations that directly affect reader experience and retention: keep your Substack profile's About page focused on what the reader will experience, not your biographical credentials. Pin your first chapter so new visitors can start reading immediately. Create an index page that organizes chapters chronologically — but title your chapters descriptively rather than numerically, because "Chapter 47" intimidates a new subscriber while "The Letter from Seville" intrigues them. Set up a welcome email sequence that warmly introduces your story world and links directly to the opening chapter. And publish on a consistent schedule — the same day each week, at the same time — because serial fiction thrives on habit, and habits require predictability.
The Buffer Is Non-Negotiable
Write ten to fifteen chapters before you publish the first one. Maintain a buffer of six to ten chapters throughout your serial's run. This isn't optional, and it isn't just about avoiding deadline stress — though it prevents that too. The buffer is what allows you to revise earlier chapters in light of discoveries you make while writing later ones. Serial fiction is a form that teaches you about your own story as you write it, and without a buffer, you lose the ability to act on those discoveries before they reach readers.
Plan your writing schedule around buffer maintenance, not just production. If you publish one chapter per week, you need to write at a pace that exceeds one chapter per week — accounting for revision, life interruptions, and the inevitable weeks when the writing simply doesn't come. Time-based writing goals (thirty focused minutes per day) prove more sustainable than word-count targets for most serializers, because they create a daily habit without the anxiety of a number that may or may not be achievable on any given day.
Monetization as a Craft Decision
The question of whether and when to charge for your serial is ultimately a craft decision disguised as a business one. A free serial optimizes for reach — maximum readership, maximum discoverability, maximum community engagement. A paid serial optimizes for commitment — readers who have invested financially tend to read more carefully, engage more deeply, and provide more thoughtful feedback. Both approaches produce different relationships between writer and audience, and those relationships shape the work itself.
Most successful fiction serializers on Substack employ a hybrid model: the core serial remains free, building audience and community, while supplementary content — author's notes on craft decisions, character backstories, alternate POV chapters, early access to future installments — sits behind a paywall. This approach lets the story itself circulate freely while rewarding committed fans with deeper access to the creative process.
If you do introduce paid subscriptions, the consensus from experienced serializers suggests waiting until you've built an engaged free audience of at least three to five hundred subscribers with strong open rates (above forty percent — fiction newsletters typically outperform Substack's overall average). Launch paid tiers as an event, not a quiet toggle. Pricing between five and eight dollars monthly, with an annual discount, aligns with what fiction readers expect to pay and compares favorably to the cost of a single book purchase while providing ongoing income.
The deeper point: your monetization model should reflect your relationship with your readers and your goals for the work. If you're serializing a novel you intend to publish traditionally afterward, keeping it free may preserve your options (though consult with an agent or publishing attorney about how much pre-publication is advisable — a common guideline is no more than ten percent of the final book). If you're building a long-term direct relationship with readers as your primary publishing strategy, a paid model creates sustainability. There's no single right answer, only the answer that serves your specific creative and professional situation.
A Diagnostic Exercise for Your Serial
Before you publish your first chapter — or if you've already started and something feels off — try this diagnostic. Take any chapter from your serial and ask these five questions:
1. Does this chapter contain at least one complete emotional movement? Not a full arc, necessarily, but a shift — from uncertainty to resolve, from ignorance to discovery, from connection to rupture. If the chapter only advances the plot without completing any emotional motion, it will feel like a fragment rather than an installment.
2. Could a reader describe what this chapter is "about" in one sentence — independent of its plot function? If the only answer is "it's the part where X travels to Y," the chapter lacks its own identity. The best serial chapters can be characterized by their emotional or thematic content: "It's the one where she finally admits she's afraid." "It's the one where the city itself becomes a character."
3. Does the final paragraph create forward momentum through something other than physical suspense? Check your last five chapter endings. If more than two rely on danger, surprise, or a shocking reveal, you're overusing your weakest tool. Replace at least one with an emotional hook, a philosophical question, or a character decision that the reader can't predict.
4. Is the prose voice doing something that only your voice can do? Read the chapter aloud. Does it sound like you at your most distinctive, or does it sound like competent genre fiction that any skilled writer might produce? Serial readers are subscribing to you — your sensibility, your sentence rhythms, your way of seeing. If the voice flattens into neutral competence, the chapter needs revision.
5. Would you send this chapter to someone who's never read your serial? If the answer is no because it requires too much context, the chapter may be doing too little internal work. The best serial chapters reward loyal readers with continuity while remaining accessible enough that a curious newcomer could read one and want more.
This diagnostic won't transform your serial overnight, but applied consistently across every chapter before publication, it will prevent the two most common failures of Substack fiction: installments that feel like homework (advancing plot without delivering experience) and serials that burn bright for ten chapters before collapsing into obligation.
The Oldest New Form
Serial fiction has survived every shift in technology and reading culture for the simple reason that it aligns with something fundamental about how humans engage with stories. We don't just want to consume a narrative — we want to live alongside one, to carry its characters with us between installments, to wonder and anticipate and argue about what happens next. The serial format creates a relationship between reader and story that a single-sitting novel, for all its virtues, simply cannot replicate.
Substack didn't invent this relationship. Scheherazade invented it. Dickens industrialized it. Maupin adapted it for newsprint. The platform simply provides the infrastructure for you to participate in one of fiction's oldest and most intimate traditions — one where your readers aren't passive consumers but active participants in the life of your story, arriving each week not because an algorithm surfaced your content but because they chose to be there.
Your novel doesn't have to wait for a gatekeeper's approval. It can begin finding its readers this month, this week, one chapter at a time. The craft principles that made serialization work in the nineteenth century are the same ones that will make your Substack serial work now: chapters that satisfy on their own terms, pacing that sustains over the long run, hooks that respect your reader's intelligence, and a voice so distinctive that people subscribe not just for the story but for the pleasure of spending time in your particular company.
The readers are out there. The form is proven. The question is whether you're ready to do the craft work that serialization demands — and whether you're willing to let your story live in public, one installment at a time, growing alongside the community that gathers around it.
Some of the best writing breakthroughs happen away from a screen — in a room full of other writers, in a city that changes how you see. Our destination retreats in Paris, Dublin, Iceland, Tuscany, Santa Fe, New Orleans, and beyond pair intensive craft workshops with the kind of immersive experience that transforms your writing from the inside out.
Explore Destination Retreats →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
