Laterpress Serials Need to be a Thing
For one, it remembers where you are in the story
You may not know, if you haven’t read my earlier articles, Laterpress is a publishing tool for web-based reading and Ebook downloads. It’s free. If you bring in your own sales, Laterpress takes no cut. The only outside party who takes a piece is Stripe.
My previous articles inspired
to experiment with Laterpress, and you can take a look at his work here.If you want to take a look, the articles are at ThaddeusThomas.com
And there was another post that I’ve since unpublished where I reassessed by first impulse to dismiss the community features. I may have to reassess them, again.
In that first article I showed how Laterpress worked. By the second article, I had discovered that people aren’t very keen on clicking stuff on Substack, especially anything that might take them away from Substack.
This morning I went back to work preparing a chapter of The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh for release, and that took me over to Laterpress. I’ve been publishing there, as well, for anyone who wants a different reading experience.
During my time away, Laterpress has gone through some changes.
When I open my book to edit, this is what I see now. There are two key differences beyond aesthetics that I’ve noted so far. First is that we have better editing options for the book blurb that comes along with the book cover (and before the reader access the book chapters). Before it was a single paragraph that you couldn’t do much with. Now you can have paragraph breaks and add bold and italics. This is a great improvement.
Inside the editing function, the big new thing is the Storybook function which seems to be a Scrivener-inspired organizational tool.
Here you see it in its side-by-side format, but it can be expanded. It’s a place to create a bible and an outline for your book, which I think is a welcome addition.
However, they’ve also added AI. I don’t get it, and I don’t appreciate it. With an expression of my disgust, I’ll leave it at that, but you can read their blog on the subjectpost here.
These new changes rolled out June 20th, 2024. I’ve visited their blog and Discord and see no updates on community features. There are two, as of this 2022 blog post, an affiliate link and recommendations. You don’t have to opt-in, but if you, you opt-in for all your books and collections. You can’t pick and choose. That’s an issue for me.
The recommendations appear when someone finishes a book on the platform, assuming that author has opted in. They’re as relevant as whatever genre you’ve selected, and when I tried it out, the books that appeared were written by one of the founders of Laterpress.
Affiliate links allow you to promote someone else’s book, assuming the author has opted in, and take a cut if a purchase is made.
I’m still not thrilled with the community features. In the now unpublished article, I had decided to use them, but that has since changed. I’m still experimenting with Laterpress right now, and access to all versions of all my books just doesn’t work for me right now.
Serialized Novels on Laterpress Need to be a Thing
My vacation messed up my reading schedule. I’m behind and still trying to catch up, and when I return to serialized novel, I don’t know where I left off. I have to figure it out by going to the table of contents and skimming chapter titles and summaries. At Latepress, that’s not an issue. It remembers where I am in the story.
The potential benefits for Laterpress don’t mean much if readers aren’t willing to click a button. I’ll be giving that issue some more though. In addition, in future articles, if I see a possible way we can benefit from their future growth, I’ll talk about that, too. It’s early days with Laterpress, but that’s the only comparison to early-days Substack I see right now.
What’s that about early-days Substack?
I mentioned before what I’ve seen said by early adopters of Substack. The secret of their success is luck. They got in early and rode the wave, and they couldn’t begin to tell us how to repeat their success now. Laterpress is still new, and that begs the question if their community features offer a coming wave for authors to ride.
As far as the early-days talk at Substack, days of growth yet await, but they’re right, they can’t tell us how to replicate their success. We’ll have to figure that out on our own.
I’m sharing my ideas in the Right Reader System.
Until next time,
I’m Thaddeus Thomas.
P.S. — It is urgent that anyone who chooses to use the new tagging protocol see the update. It will keep you out of the spam fliter. See below.
