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Spotlight On: Fiction Writing with Elle Griffin of The Novelleist
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Spotlight On: Fiction Writing with Elle Griffin of The Novelleist


Last Wednesday, we hosted a workshop with Elle Griffin of The Novelleist to learn about how to serialize fiction on Substack.

When Elle finished writing her first book, she began to research the best way to publish it, but what she found was distressing. 98 percent of books published in 2020 sold less than 5,000 copies, and traditional publishing offered few viable paths for less established authors to make a living. Elle summarized her learnings in a Substack post called, “The one where writing books is not really a good idea.” The article’s sharp analysis of the publishing industry hit a nerve, garnering the post more than 70,000 views.

In the article, Elle analyzes online platforms like Wattpad, Patreon, Amazon, and Substack as potential alternatives to traditional publishing. She makes the case that while there isn’t yet a perfect home for fiction online, Substack presented the most promising opportunity to publish and monetize her serial novel.

We asked Elle to host a Spotlight On because of the rigor with which she has approached serializing her fiction on Substack. Elle has also been uniquely generous to fellow writers in the fiction genre – finding and gathering nearly 500 writers in the Substack Writers Unite Discord group, and also spotlighting other writers on her own Substack.

The transcript has been edited for length and readability. You can listen to the full interview as a podcast in this post. 

To sign up for future writer interviews and workshops, head here


Why did you decide to serialize your upcoming novel on Substack?

After I finished writing my novel, I set out to do what every writer does: pitch it to agents. I pitched more than 120 agents, and they all rejected it.

As I was going through that process, I realized why all these agents were rejecting my book. It’s a strange little gothic novel. It’s a book that will appeal to a certain kind of person, but it won't appeal to every kind of person.

If you're a big publishing house, what you're looking for are blockbusters – the Dan Browns of the world who are going to write a novel that’s going to sell millions of copies. The publishing house takes 70% of those royalties, and that's how they fuel their business. Meanwhile, only 0.01% of books will sell more than 100,000 copies. In fact, 96% of books sell less than 1,000 copies total!

Well, my book is definitely not a blockbuster. If I'm only going to sell 1,000 or 2,000 copies – because that's about as big of an audience as I can picture – how can I effectively monetize it? If I put the book up for sale on Amazon for $3 each, then my family and 100 other people might find it, and I'd make a couple hundred bucks.

At the same time as I was researching the publishing industry, the creator economy was emerging. New tools are allowing creative people to monetize a really niche audience. It only takes 1,000 people paying $8 a month for a creator to make a living of $100,000 a year.

Writers were tapping into the creator economy through Substack, but most weren’t writing fiction yet. I knew writers charging people from $5 a month up to $40 a month; on Substack, there were people earning millions of dollars a year.

Here's this platform that already has the business structure ready to go, so I wanted to try it for fiction. If there are 1,000 people out there who are willing pay $8 a month to subscribe to my novel as a serial, then that would work out financially for me. I could fund my writing. After all, this isn’t a new idea. The Count of Monte Cristo, Charles Dickens, and more classic books were all initially serialized.

How have you grown your email list so far?

I started my Substack in February, and it has grown by almost 1,000 readers in the last two months.

In trying to grow my audience on Substack, I figured the easiest way would be to learn from other Substack writers. I stalked everyone I could find on Twitter who used the combination of the word “fiction” and the word “Substack” in a tweet. I messaged them and invited them to a Discord server so we could learn from each other. There are hundreds of fiction writers in the community now, all talking about what has worked and not worked for each of us. We have a little spreadsheet called “cross promotions” where we put in our Substack URL and genre so we can contact each other and exchange mentions of one other’s work.

But what was most helpful for growth was writing two articles that took me a really long time to produce. One took me all of 2020 to researchThe other one took me another six months to research. Those two articles were about the publishing industry at large. It turned out that they resonated with people because publishing is a black box, and there are a lot of writers also trying to understand how it works.

I shared those two articles a bunch of different ways, including on Hacker News. You can share your link on there, and sometimes they go viral and sometimes they don't, but one of mine did. That article had something like 60,000 views in one day, and a lot of subscribers came from that one piece of writing that really resonated.

How are you approaching charging readers for a serialized novel?

Fiction writing is not the same as writing nonfiction on Substack. With nonfiction, you're expecting rolling admissions. You're getting new subscribers every month, and it doesn't matter where those new people start reading because the next article you publish isn't necessarily attached to the last one.

For fiction, the posts are sequential, so I’m following the funding model you see with an online course. In these courses, you have to take the first class before the second class. There is a clear order, and people running courses often open enrollment just once a year. During those enrollment periods, they send tons of promotional communication encouraging people to sign up for their course. After that period, the promotions die down.

That's how I'm going to approach it with my novel. September is my “enrollment period.” My plan is to publish the first four chapters in September to my entire newsletter list for free. At the bottom of each of those posts, I’ll tell readers that in order to keep reading in October, they’ll need to subscribe and pay an annual fee. I’m charging $10 a month or $50 a year, so my hope is to encourage everybody to buy into the full year in September – essentially, they’re buying the whole book by doing so. When October hits, my audience should be locked in. Everybody will be signed up to get the book as paid posts, and all of them will be receiving installments at the same time.

I plan to do this same process every year. This first book will be done in June. I'll have July and August off, and in September, I’ll start my second book. So there will be a new book in the same window of time as when Substack starts saying to readers, “Hey, by the way, your annual subscriptions are about to renew.”

I think this annual approach is easier on writers who aren't used to asking for money because you just need to do so once a year, and then you can focus on writing.


Elle’s extra tips for fiction writers

  • Use sections to delineate different topics and chapters. In addition to writing her novel, Elle publishes a Substack newsletter about fiction writing. She uses Substack’s sections feature to separate her posts into categories for readers, and shares in her demo (above) how other fiction writers are using sections to guide readers through the chapters of books.

  • Prepare for readers to join mid-story. Update: since this workshop was hosted, we have created a feature that allows writers to enable “next” and “previous” buttons on their posts in the Publication Details section of the settings page. This allows readers to quick navigate to sequential post.

  • Consider paid plans unique to fiction writing. Elle plans to publish four free chapters that go out to her entire list. After that, her chapters will be gated and paid. Elle noted that you can also try a founding member plan. Sasha’s founding plan includes a print copy of the book when it’s completed. Learn more about how to customize your subscription settings.

Hoping for more tips on how to start a fiction publication on Substack? Join Elle’s Discord community here.


Spotlight On is a series of live events hosted by Substack. The goal is to learn from writers across categories who have experienced success on Substack. Stay tuned for our next events here.

Discussion about this episode

I think that Substack might want to consider the centuries-old tradition of holding a physical book in one’s hands & having a personal library. You have solved one part of the current publishing situation, but wouldn’t it be nice to also have the means to have stories, essays, and books in print format?

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Yes! I love this. That’s why I’ll be offering a hardcover edition of my novel for higher level supporters. I know a few other Substack writers offer that as well (like sashachapin.substack.com)

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These are brilliant. It's fascinating to hear about other people's work. Keep them coming.

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But you've taken the cost of reading a book up to $50! Or worse, $120. That's where I start scratching my head. I have a novel in the near-querying phase, too, I'm also overhauling my entire presence to "My Name - Author." I'm also starting at zero when it comes to my list, but mercy me, I'm doing so many different setups at once, it's as hard as writing/revising the book. I can understand this as a way to make a good haul in one season, and I applaud your success, I'd really like to see more evidence about the $120 v $50 bit for a novel, one they admittedly may never see on a lessening shelf at B&N, granted. Maybe I missed something above. I'm not trying to cause a fuss and disagree, just seeking to better understand. --Donny

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Oh yes, I completely agree. Why would someone pay $5/month for four chapters, when they could pay $2.99 for a whole book on Amazon? The answer is: 1) Because some readers want to support their favorite authors, and 2) Because readers get more than just chapters. It's more like being part of a book club community with the author herself!

In my case, I plan to offer readers access to my private discord community, shout outs in the acknowledgements section of my book, the ability to write the foreword to my book, and even the ability to attend the wrap party for my book in-person at the end. And then yes, when the serialization period is over, it will go up on Wattpad/Kindle etc., where it will be much less expensive. If someone discovers my book there and wants to read my next one, they can wait a year to get it on Kindle, or they can start reading it "now" while its serializing.

I think it sounds strange to some people, but you have to consider that there are people on this planet who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars buying "weapons" in an online virtual game. So if there are people out there who will support their favorite video game, there are definitely people out there who will support their favorite author. :)

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Please don't view me as a hostile witness. I'm not arguing with you. My book is about four teen boys who build a treehouse off their Air Force base in Upper Michigan next to the secret hideaway of a Soviet spy in 1977. I am looking at interactive maps on my personal site, which I'm presently also building, and affiliate links to nostalgic items from the time period. The FB group of people from the old base are close to 7K, and USAFBrats is close to 60K, if I recall. So yeah, I get what you're doing. Just looking for evidence as well re the right path to take. You're clearly on the path less travelled. This is certainly an idea that makes sense. After all, membership has privileges, per AmEx....

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Oh I absolutely understand!! And congrats on your book!!!!!

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I can really see your point. It's an important one. It makes me think of my libraries were ever set up in the first place.

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The trouble with libraries is that they buy ten copies of an eBook (as if it were a print book) and then they loan it out to thousands of people. Those people then have to "wait in line" to get one of those few copies and in this transaction, the author earns about $10. In my opinion, the library should work more like Spotify: where there are an unlimited amount of copies readers can use, and the author gets paid a small royalty fee every time someone streams it (in this case, reads a page). This is kind of how Kindle Unlimited works, but it would be even better if implemented by the library!

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This was a great workshop, kudos to Elle and the Substack team for organising. I was pleased to be featured in the section about sections 😊

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Well you've got a good setup! Worth modeling after!

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Love Elle and her writing, so happy to see her spotlighted on Substack :)

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I've been blogging and self-publishing non-fiction online for about 20 years through different platforms but I'm just now working on my first fiction novel, so take all of this with a grain of salt!

Depending upon your genre, there could be lots of "bonus" things you could offer to your paid subscribers that could be fun to create and fun for them to read. For example, I'm writing a sci-fi novel set on Earth in the distant future (though that's not exactly clear at first) and I have ideas for several novels in this setting. So I've created an entire world, extensive back story/history/evolution, "awakened abilities," basic religion, maps, main character histories, etc. Off the top of my head, I could offer subscriber bonus content such as:

* Character profiles and/or histories

* Awakened abilities - descriptions, known limitations, categories, status, etc.

* Short stories about main characters

* Short stories about interesting supporting characters

* History of places (Strongholds, the Five-City Alliance, etc)

* Alternate perspectives - take an important or exciting scene and rewrite it from a different character's point of view

* Codex writings - "excerpts" from their religious text

* Journal entries from a minor character

With my novel and its "world," I would also like to do a podcast - maybe biweekly - that's a traveling bard telling tales to audiences. The tales could be fun, embellished, and wouldn't need to fit exactly with the details in the novel because, well, it's just a bard who's entertaining an audience!

Obviously, all of this takes time and would need to be appropriate for the audience, but it could be lots of fun. In the right genres, it could also provide details of your "world" for folks who might be interested in writing "fan fiction." Heck, you could even encourage fan fiction and offer subscribers the opportunity to publish the best fan fiction on your Substack.

Anyway, good luck Elle and thanks for everything you're doing!

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Thank you. Most important stuff. Wish you all the success and monetary funds from it. Break a Leg! (so to speak).

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Your welcome. Looking forward to seeing your successes.

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Thank you, Elle!!

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Hi Elle. Love your efforts here. You have helped enforce my "gut" decision to write, illustrate and narrate on Substack more than worthy of my time. Would love to connect with yourself and any other newer writers to combine forces, etc. Thanks!

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Hi all, just launched my free fiction newsletter, short stories published bi-weekly! Welcome any and all engagement, would love to get to know some of you fiction writers too. I got a designer on board with my project and built a nice brand, but I'm just focused on getting the stories up and out there at the moment :)

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Love the tips! Fantastic for all kinds of substack writers!

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Interesting

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I have read carefully what Elle writes on serializing fictional novel

Elle is very clear and helpful in this sense, I hope my comments on the Melting will be appreciated, and what I am just writing , then published in newsletters will be felt as experience of many women s lives, or simply a true STORY where everyone can identify in a way or another..

let s see..I 'm writing now ...........

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