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Elizabeth Tai's avatar

Adding my comment and expanding it as per your request lol.

As I said in an earlier note, Substack's UI is not set up to favour fiction writers, so they will have a harder time sharing their work or for them to be found.

Here are my recommendations from a content design and UI standpoint:

- Enable chapter and series posts

- Under categories, fiction should be subcategorised to genres

- Have an ongoing and completed option as well as readers look for that

- Enable an authors page, like what Amazon has for authors, where their works/novels are listed. Each work should have its own page with chapters listed. This enables casual browsers to take a chance on the story as it's well organized. Currently they have to dive into the archives and it's not efficient.

- Have a just updated timeline rather than an algorithmic one to ensure everyone, small, big, famous can have a fair chance of being seen.

Personally I find Wattpad’s UI to be great for fiction. So you can have a look there to get what I mean by "good UI for fiction".

That said, Substack was built with the email newsletter in mind. We may not be able to implement any of my suggestions.

Also, from a tech company's standpoint all this takes huge resources to implement, something they may not want to do. It takes a lot of work to even add ONE feature let alone a slew of them. So, they may not think it's a priority right now. However, one can dream.

So what can authors do in the meantime? Wait for Substack to take action?

No, I urge you to be mercenary, selfish and platform agnostic. I do like some asepcts of Substack, for one I appreciate that they enable me to have an email list without burning my bank account. So, stay on Substack if you like, but don't forget other platforms.

It is more work, for sure, to be at more than one place at a same time. But be mercenary about discoverability - don't think Substack only.

Unfortunately, a platform will always have its "preferred genre". It is usually hard to change. Therefore, go where your readers dwell and be there.

PS: I have a background in content design, journalism and tech writing. So I'm very nerdy in that aspect.

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Michael Evans's avatar

I really appreciate this piece, John. You did a fantastic job and I'm really excited you found Ream. We actually only launched out of Beta in May, so about 7 months ago. We went into Beta in Mid-January last year. We are a small bootstrapped team, but that allows us to focus on our fiction authors. A lot of other players in the space have raised lots and lots of money from VCs and have very high expectations and thus have to chase bigger and bigger markets to just keep the lights on for their next fundraising round. Thus, it is not a surprise that fiction is overlooked. We wanted to change that. And by fiction authors for fiction authors, means that. The authors you see on the home page all joined Ream before we launched to the public and many of which were Emilia's friends. We've grown beyond that to nearly 4,000 authors on the platform now. And we are excited to highlight the depth and diversity of the authors in our community with discovery coming very soon. Excited for what's to come. Storytellers Rule the World!

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