Experimenting with Serial Fiction Formatting

Table of Contents and Selling Books

Today, I’m discussing my experiments in formatting my next serial:
Kraken in a Coffee Cup.

This part of today’s article will be brief because you’re meant to click through to the table of contents at the end and from there preview chapter one as well as see what links look like for posts that are scheduled to post but haven’t yet been published. If you don’t know how that’s done, I’ll get into that soon.

Of course, depending on how far in the future you’re reading this, that preview may be gone and all the chapters could be live.

There are two fundamental problems I’m trying to solve here. One, I would like to be able to schedule a serialized chapter to post without then worrying about updating the table of contents. Of the possibilities I was considering, it simply boiled down to presetting links. Until the post publishes, the page will show as a place holder with a countdown. In this case, I chose custom buttons so I could highlight the date each chapter is due to go live and cut down on confusion.

Understanding that links can be set in advance is a fairly straightforward solution, but the other concepts I toyed with all proved impossible. To get the countdown page, the post has to actually be scheduled. However, it can be a shell to be filled at your convenience.

The other problem I’m trying to solve is book promotion. At the end of the TOC and the first chapter, I’ve included a teaser and a call-to-action, encouraging readers to visit my books for sale. In the TOC, I also include an insert for the “current promotions page” here at Literary Salon. That page will be updated with the most current promotions.

I didn’t include the insert in the chapter because I don’t want to interrupt the story. It’s not added to the end because I want to avoid overwhelming the reader with a bunch of calls-to-action smashed in together. The reminder to subscribe, the insert, and the teaser all hold their own space.

As for the storefront, I’m experimenting with different providers, but for fiction I’m currently choosing Laterpress. Literary Salon’s shop services will most likely be handled by PayHip.

This is the page to which the teaser links lead. You can host a collection or single books at Laterpress, but your bio displays everything you offer—so that’s where I’m sending my readers. Of the books available above, The Sibyliad is a collection (a series) and Detective, 26 AD is a standalone book.

I’ve chosen Laterpress over Ream for two reasons. The fact that Laterpress won’t take a cut of sales I bring in directly will always be a factor, but it’s more a question of what I’m trying to achieve by sending my readers here. The point is to sell my books. Ream’s catalog is a distraction from that purpose.

I’ll be adding more works to the store soon.

I had decided to make nothing at the store free, but I do have the first novella in The Sibyliad series priced at a dollar. Of course, I’m making books available for free in our promotions, and I’ve just begun making a free book available when people first subscribe. Currently, the link is sent to their email, and they download the book from Bookfunnel.

Notice I said that I “had” decided to make nothing free? It may be better to send new readers to the bookstore. They’d still be there to get their free book, but it would also expose them to the other books available. I’ll experiment with Literary Salon and PayHip to see if I can make that work in a satisfying way. At Laterpress, there are no discount codes of which I’m aware. It would simply mean making the book(s) in question free for everyone. It could be worth it.

Will new readers buy right away? Probably not, but any decision to purchase requires repeated exposure. The goal is to sell books and this would move us in that direction in a way that Bookfunnel’s simple delivery would not.

Sidenote: it’s increasingly clear that I’m alone in not wanting Substack to offer eBooks directly through the newsletter. It could be done right, but even if it were done wrong, we’d be obligated* to use it. Bookfunnel is great for promotions, but I would never use it as a storefront, even though through integration with a payment processor it’s possible. Building storefronts is not Bookfunnel’s focus, and it shows. An eBook storefront wouldn’t be Substack’s focus either.

*I don’t mean we’d legally obligated to host our books here, but with all authors doing so, it would hurt sales to refuse to do so—no matter how poorly executed the storefront. Everybody screams for it, but the newsletter and sales are best kept seperate entities. Plus, we’re able to move between newsletter platforms without disrupting the store and vice-versa.

Let’s move on to sharing a preview of an unpublished post.

click on the screenshot and it will take you to the promotions page

In the screenshot above, you see the promotion insert, but in the bottom right corner there’s the settings button. That’s where you’re able to do a few things you can’t accomplish anywhere else.

Once on the Post Settings page, you’ll scroll down until you see “Secret draft link.” Copy that and whoever you give it to can view your work-in-progress. If you no longer want them to have access, you click where it says “reset link.”

Farther down, you see SEO Options. That becomes important if you want to change the address of a post. My initial theories wanted the TOC to be a tag page, but those are organized with the newest posts at the top. My experiments had me creating shell posts for the last three chapters of the book. When that proved fruitless, I switched to the current method and edited the posts to now be the first three chapters. Of course, their addresses still reflected the old chapter numbering.

Tip: unschedule the post before you change the address. Otherwise, any links you’ve made to the page you’ll have to fix manually.

Okay, let’s move this over to ThaddeusThomas.com:

Table of Contents: Kraken...

Click on the insert above to continue.

—Thaddeus Thomas

---

And now…

Discover New Testament Noir in Detective 26 AD.

She helped me to my feet, and though the hand that held mine had struck me only minutes earlier, I found it difficult to let go.

“My name's Thaddeus,” I said.

“Mali. You were brave to stand before Pilate. Not many would choose to do so. They'd ignore the opportunity to discover life's meaning for the sake of safe routine.”

“I was a fool,” I said. “I want my life to mean something, but not that.”

Her eyes were kind, and her grip, strong. “We all want our lives to have meaning, but that meaning is not ours to choose.”

“How can there be meaning in something that's forced upon us?”

“We might not choose the meaning of our lives, but we can look for the opportunities we’re presented.”

“I've done enough. It's over.”

“Maybe. If you want it to be,” she said. “You can choose to avoid it altogether. It's what cowards have always done.”

That hurt. “How do you go from telling me I’m brave to calling me a coward?”

“A moment's bravery often leads men into a life of cowardice, but I don't know you well enough to say one way or the other. Let me ask you a question: if you had to define your life right now, what would you say?"

“I find lost things. There's not much more to it.”

“And there never will be, if you truly think you've done enough.” She looked back to the temple, which stood in silhouette against the star-filled sky. “A meaningful life isn't made by one heroic act. It's found when we do the difficult thing without reward and rise to do it again.”