Serializing Literary Novels and Genre Fiction
Where to Serialize Your Genre Fiction
Serialized fiction is a great way to bring your writing to new audiences and keep yourself on track to complete a novel. Services like Kindle Vella and Radish allow you to serialize your fiction from within a specific platform. Radish is geared toward romance, which makes it a great place to publish your serialized romance novel. The most successful authors on Kindle Vella tend to be in the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and romance. While anyone can set up a Kindle Vella account and begin publishing, Radish requires you to submit a writing sample and synopsis. If they accept you as a writer, you set up your preferred pricing model and a regular schedule for publishing chapters of 1,000 – 2,000 words each.
Both Kindle Vella and Radish allow readers to access serial episodes with tokens, and authors receive a small percentage of the price paid for tokens when users read their work. The returns are small per read, but the advantage is that readers come to Kindle Vella and Radish specifically to read serialized work. That said, you will definitely need to promote yourself heavily in order to drive readers to your site, as these are crowded platforms.
But where does this leave writers who are not working in the popular commercial genres?
Publishing Serial Fiction on Substack
Neither Kindle Vella nor Radish are designed for literary fiction. Although you can publish literary fiction on those platforms, it would be very difficult to stand out from the crowd and find readers. One solution is substack.
Although substack is designed for newsletters, it can be used to serialize fiction too, if you’re willing to put in the work. One of the most successful writers of serialized fiction on substack is Elle Griffin, who publishes the serial fantasy project Oblivion on The Novelleist. In 2023, I’ll be publishing my own serialized novel on Substack. (As a traditionally published author, I want to see if writing a serialized novel will help motivate me to write more and reach new readers).
Where to Submit Literary Serial Fiction
But what if you don’t have an audience yet and you don’t write in popular genres like romance, sci-fi, and fantasy? Although Substack has terrific growth features, it can be an intimidating place to start from scratch. And the very nature of serial fiction is that it is geared toward chapters with the kind of cliffhanger endings that work well in specific commercial genres.
If you want to serialize literary fiction, a great place to start is Fiction Attic Press, which has just launched a serial literary fiction series. Fiction Attic’s first serialized book of fiction, The Man of the House Comes Home, is a novella-in-flash by Elle Enderlin. Every chapter is offered in audio and written format. Read or listen to chapter one here. Unlike Kindle Vella, Fiction Attic serial fiction is highly curated and very selective. You must submit the entire novella at once, and the press chooses among submissions to find the best novella to serialize.
Fiction Attic Press is seeking submissions of novellas-in-flash, for which they pay their writers. On their submission page, click the “Novella-in-Flash” category to submit. You can submit your serial fiction here.