Getting started in web serial writing
Web serial writing has the lowest barrier of entry of any major method of publishing your story. You can literally just start. There are two steps:
- start writing your story
- decide how/where you want to publish it
The writing part, I assume you have handled. The important thing to note here is that you gotta see the project through. Start and don’t stop until you’re done. For publishing, you have a few options:
1. Publish on a website designed for web serial novels
There are a few of these around, they’re usually free to publish on (although most offer a paid account to give you ad space or boost you int he algorithm or whatever), and your best choice generally depends on which one happens to gravitate to a niche that best suits your kind of work. The big names in this industry are Royal Road and Scribblehub, which, last I checked up on them (about a year ago) tended towards isekai and light erotica respectively. (You absolutely can publish outside these niches on these sites, it’s just much harder to get traction.) Publishing somewhere like this comes with multiple advantages. Firstly, there’s a writing community right there to talk to; there’s usually a forum or something where people gather to talk about reading or writing on the site. Second, the site itself is designed specifically to publish web serials, and will come with a good layout and hit trackers and ‘where you left off’ buttons for the reader and all that; generally all you have to do is copy-paste the text of a chapter into the page and the site will do everything else for you. Third, there’s an audience sitting right there, browsing the 'latest arrivals’ or 'most popular’ page of the site; if you can get high in the algorithm, you have to do little if any marketing.
The downsides of such places usually come down to the same things as the advantages. Such sites are a flooded market. Your story absolutely will drown in a sea of other stories, a great many of them terrible, and most of them with the advantage of catering to the site’s niche. Gaining an audience there is often a matter of trying to game an algorithm, and the community can be… variable. Some of these places are nice but most of them are a bunch of authors trying to tear down everyone around them to make their own work look better by comparison int he hopes of poaching audiences for their story instead. If you go this route, I’d recommend shopping around for a site that fits you personality and writing style (or just posting on many sites at once; you can also do that).
These places also tend to get targeted by scrapers who will steal your story and sell it as an ebook, which is very annoying.
2. publish on another site
Plenty of people publish web serials here on Tumblr. I do not know why. This site is TERRIBLY set up for that. It makes tracking stories and updates a pain in the arse (people end up having to *manually tag every reader whenever they post an update*), building and maintaining archives are annoying, community building is surprisingly difficult for a social media site, and it’s just generally far more work for both writer and reader than it needs to be. You often do have a ready-made audience, though.
This does tend to work better on other sites. Reddit has multiple communities for reading and writing various types of fiction; publishing on these is a bit more work than somewhere like Royal Road, but not very much, and many of these communities are very active. There aren’t as many forums around as there used to be, but you might be able to find fiction hosting forums, if that’s what you prefer. And of course, many writers who simply want to write and don’t mind not being paid choose to write on AO3.
These sites are a good middle ground compromise for people who want a ready-made community and don’t mind putting in a bit of extra work.
3. make your own site
This is what I did. You can make a website for free, giving people a hub to find you and all your work, designed however you like. You can also pay for a website if you want it to be a little bit nicer. This option is the most work, but gives you the most control and leaves you free of having to worry about any algorithm.
The obvious downside of this is that there’s no community there. If you host your work on your own website, you need to bring people to it. You need to build an audience on your own. This is not an easy thing to do.
Building an audience (general advice)
Here is some general advice about building an audience:
1. Consistency. Consistency. Consistency.
If you want people to read your writing, the best piece of advice I can possibly give you is have an update schedule and update on time, always. If you need to take a break, give people as much warning as possible and tell them exactly when you will be back, and come back then. Do not take unnecessary breaks because you don’t feel like writing. (Do take breaks if you get carpal tunnel or need time off for a major life event or something – your health is more important than the story.) If you’re taking a lot of breaks to avoid burnout, you’re doing it wrong – you need to rework your whole schedule from the start and slow down updates to make these breaks unnecessary. Two chapters a month with no breaks is a billion times better than four chapters a month with frequent burnout breaks.
Consistency. Consistency. Consistency.
A reliable schedule is the #1 factor in audience retention. If readers need to randomly check in or wait for notifications from you to check if there’s an update, guess what? Most of them won’t! They’ll read something else. You want your audience to be able to anticipate each release and fit it in their own schedule. I cannot overstate the importance of this.
2. If you can, try to make your story good.
We writers would love to live in a world where this is the most important thing, but it actually isn’t. Plenty of people out there are perfectly happy to read hot garbage. How do I define 'hot garbage’? It doesn’t matter. Think of what you would consider to be just a terrible, no-effort, pointless garbage story that the world would be better off without. Someone is out there writing that right now, making US$2,500/month on Patreon.
It is, however, a real advantage if you can make your story good. At the very least, it should be worth your audience’s time. Preferably, it should also be worth their money, and make them enthusiastic enough to try to get their friends into it. Managing this is massively advantageous.
3. Accept that you’re not going to get a big audience for a really long time. Write consistently and update on schedule every time anyway.
It took me over a year to get my second patron. For the first year, I updated Curse Words every single week, on schedule, for over a year, and had maybe… four readers. One of them was a regular commenter. One of them was my first patron. There was no one else.
My audience has grown pretty rapidly, for this industry.
You’re not gonna start publishing chapters for a big, vibrant community. You’re just not. And you have to keep going anyway. These days, I have a pretty good readership, and those couple of loyal readers (who I appreciate beyond words) have grown into a much larger community, who hang out and debate theories with each other and liveblog and drag in new readers and make fanart. My discord has over 550 members, with volunteer moderators and regular fan artists and its own little in-jokes and games and readers who make a point of welcoming newcomers and helping them navigate the discord, all with very little input from me. I start crying when I think about these people, who do the bulk of my social and marketing work for me just because they want to help, and my patrons who, after writing for over 4.5 years, have recently helped me pass an important threshold – my web serial (via patreon) now pays my mortgage repayments. I can’t live off my writing alone, but boy is that a massive fucking step.
You’re not gonna have that when you start. You’re gonna have a couple of friends. And that’s it. Maybe for a year. Maybe less, if you’re good at marketing and lucky. Maybe longer.
You have to update on schedule, every time, anyway.
Building an audience (more specific advice)
“Yeah, that’s great, Derin, but where can I find my fucking audience?” Well, if you publish on a web serial site, then the audience is there and you jsut need to grab their affention using the tools and social norms offered to you by the site. I utterly failed at this and cannot help you there. You can still use these other tips to bring in readers from off-site.
1. Paid ads
I’ve never paid for ads so I can’t offer advice on how to do it. I’ve Blazed a couple of posts on Tumblr; they weren’t helpful. This is, however, an option for you.
2. Actually tell people that your story exists and where they can find it.
I used to have a lot of trouble with this. I didn’t want to bother people on Tumblr and soforth by telling them about my personal project. Unfortunately you kind of have to just get over that. Now I figure that if people don’t want TTOU spam, they can just unfollow me. If you’re like me and want to just politely keep your story to yourself… don’t. You’re shooting yourself in the foot doing that.
You need to mention your story. Link your story in your bio on whatever social media sites you use. Put it in your banner on forums. Make posts and memes about it. Eventually, if you’re lucky, extremely valuable readers will start to talk about your story and meme and fanart it for you, but first, you need to let them know it exists.
It will always feel weird to do this. Just accept that people can unfollow you if they want, and do it anyway.
3. Leverage existing audiences and communities
Before I started doing this web serial thing, I used to write a lot of fanfic. The original audience that trickled in for Curse Words comes from AO3, where I was doing a full series rationalist rewrite of Animorphs. They knew how I wrote and wanted more of it. Nowadays, I still occasionally pull in readers through this route. Most of my new readers these days come from a different community – people who follow me on Tumblr. Occasionally I bring in people who don’t follow me because we’ll be talking about how one of my stories relates to something different, and fans of that thing might decide they want to check my stories out.
Your first readers will come from communities that you’re already in and that are already interested in something similar to what you’re doing (people reading my fanfic on AO3 were already there for my writing, for instance). Keep these people in mind when you start out.
One additional critical source of existing communities is your readers themselves. A huge number of my readers are people I’ve never been in any group with – they were pulled in by their friends, relatives, or community members who were reading my stories and wanted them to read them too. This is an absolutely invaluable source of 'advertising’ and it is critically important to look after these people. enthusiastic readers, word-of-mouth advertisers, and fan artists are the people who will bring in those outside your immediate bubble.
4. Your “where to find me” hub
If you’re publishing on your own website, you can simply link everything else to your homepage, and put all relevant links there. For example, I can link people to derinstories.com , which links out to all my stories, social media I want people to find me on (you don’t have to link all your social media), patreon, discord, et cetera. If you don’t have your own website, you’re going to have to create a hub like this in the bios of every site where you garner audiences from. This is the main advantage of publishing on your own website.
Monetisation
There are a few different kinds of monetisation for web serials, but most of them boil down to 'use a web serial format to market your ebook’, which to be honest I find pretty shady. These authors will start a web serial, put in enough to hook an audience for free, and then stop posting and release an ebook, with the intention of making readers pay for the ending. Now, to be clear, I am absolutely not against publishing and selling your web serial – I’m doing exactly that, with Curse Words. I am against intentionally and knowingly setting up the start of a web serial as a 'demo’ without telling your audience that that is what you are doing, soliciting Patreon money for it, and then later yanking it away unfinished and demanding money for the ending.
Monetisation of these sorts of stories is really just monetisation for normal indie publishing with the web serial acting as an ad, and I have no advice for how to do that successfully.
Your options of monetisation for a web serial as a web serial are a bit more limited. They essentially come down to merchandise (including ebooks or print books) or ongoing support (patreon, ko-fi, etc.) Of these, the only one I have experience with is the patreon model.
This model of monetisation involves setting up an account with a regular-donation site such as patreon, providing the base story for free, and providing bonuses to patrons. You can offer all kinds of bonuses for patrons. Many patrons don’t actually care what the bonus is, they’re donating to support you so that you can keep writing the story, but they still like to receive something. But some patrons do donate specifically for the bonuses, so it’s worth choosing them with care.
The most common and most effective bonus for web serials is advance chapters – if people are giving you money, give them the chapters early. You can also offer various bonus materials, merchandise, or voting rights on decisions you need to make in the future. 'Get your character put in the story’ is a popular high-tier reward. If you’re looking for reward ideas, you can see the ones I use on my patreon.
Patreon used to offer the ability to set donation goals, where you could offer something when you were making a certain amount total or had a certain number of subscribers. They recently removed this feature because Patreon hates me personally and doesn’t want me to be happy, so you kind of have to advertise it yourself now if you want to use these goals. I release chapters of unrelated stories at donation goals, and I found this to be far more effective than I thought it would be.
The important factor for this kind of monetisation is that it’s ongoing. The main advantage of this is that it makes your income far more regular and predictable than normal indie publishing – your pledges will go up or down over a month, but not by nearly as much as book sales can. The main thing to keep in mind is that it’s not a one-time sale, which means that however you organise things, you want to make sure that donating keeps on being worth it, month after month. Offering bonuses that aren’t just one-time bonuses, but things that the patron can experience every month, helps here. So does making sure that you have a good community where patrons can hang out with other patrons. (Offering advance chapters does both of these things – the patron can stay ahead in the story and discuss stuff with other patrons that non-patrons haven’t seen. I’ve found that a lot of my patrons enjoy reading an emotionally devastating chapter ahead of time, discussing it, and then all gathering a week or two later to watch the unsuspecting non-patrons experience it for the first time.)
Whatever method you use for monetisation, rule #1 is (in the words of Moist Von Lipwig): always make it easy for people to give you money. The process of finding out how to give you money should be easy, as should the process of actually doing it. And, most importantly, the spender should feel like it’s worth it to give you money. This is a big part of making it easy to give you money. Make your story worth it, make your bonuses worth it, make sure that they’re happy to be part of your community and that they enjoy reading and supporting you. And remember that support comes in many forms – the fan artist, the word-of-mouth enthuser, the person who makes your social hub a great place to be, the patron, all of these people are vital components in the life support system that keeps your story going. And you’re going to have to find them, give them a story, and build them a community, word by word and brick by brick.
It’s a long process.
Good luck.
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