Your regular newsletter will be on schedule for next Tuesday. In the mean time, however, I wanted to explain a little bit about what I’m trying to do here and point to some fellow writers who’ve embarked on trying this Substack fiction experiment

Elle Griffin writes:

There are starting to be platforms that could disrupt the publishing industry—Patreon, Wattpad, Substack, Twitter’s new Super Follow—where writers can build a following and then monetize it, perhaps even by selling their followers a subscription to their book as they are writing it. This idea deeply appeals to me because most classic novels were written as serials—think The Count of Monte Cristo, Great Expectations, Sherlock Holmes—and they were wildly successful.

My newsletter is one such experiment, but there is a growing number of other authors looking for a non-traditional outlet for their fiction writing and who have also found Substack. Listed below are some of those authors and their sites

Everything here probably isn’t for everyone, but some of them might be for someone reading this. If so, please support these authors by reading their work and passing it along to someone else who might enjoy it!

The Novelleist by Elle Griffin: “editor-in-chief of Utah Business magazine and a freelance writer for Forbes, The Muse, and other such business publications. . . . Obscurity is a piece of lush, atmospheric noir, with a strong female lead and literary tendencies. It reads like a wandering through apothecary shelves, each step revealing a vignette more dark and mercurial than the last. . . . It will debut in the fall of 2021 exclusively for my newsletter subscribers.”
“The Links is a newsletter of ongoing fiction, publishing three ‘episodes’ per week. Basically, it’s a soap opera, in an email.
In episodes you can read in less than five minutes, follow the residents of a tenement in Edinburgh: their romances and heartbreaks, their secrets and lies, their drama!”
“Monday Morning Mark will deliver a small nugget of humor right to your email inbox every Monday morning. A simple way to start your week with a smile.
In addition, I am including a microfiction (50 or 100-word) story. Many of these are humorous also.”
Jimmy Doom’s Roulette Weal: “Birdbox author Josh Malerman says ‘Everything Jimmy Doom writes is smart, smooth, spirited.’
Daily Fiction…that’s right —7 days a week I post a piece of original short fiction on Substack.”
Fiction by Bill Adler: “ My stories range in size from single-sentence microfiction to 3,000 words. I write a lot of science fiction, fantasy and magical realism, but you’ll also find love stories, adventure, thrillers, horror, and literary fiction, a smorgasbord of genres and delights.”
Logan’s Fiction Novel: “I’ll be posting chapters of a fiction book I’m writing, tentatively titled ‘Windfall.’”
Fiction in 50 by Dascha Paylor: “Three times a week, on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, one of my fifty word stories will pop up in your mailbox. Instead of sighing at yet another email to deal with, you’ll smile because you’ll know that not only will you be able to read it in less than a minute, you’ll have fun while you do.”

The Tidewater Papers

The Substack Fiction Experiment