An Experiment in Longer Fiction on Medium

I'm primarily a book writer and short story writer. I've been dabbling in short fiction on Medium for over a year. I've had some degree of success with earnings of $400+ in a month. But it is hard to come up with new ideas for short stories all the time!

I have a novella - a book of about 25,000 words - that I took off Amazon years ago. I'm not sure what I planned to do with it but it's been sitting in storage for so long. I decided that it is time to do something with it.

Earlier today, I read a Medium article about a guy who took an entire novel - a 400,000 word tomb - and published it in parts on Medium. He even wrote about how he did it. He created a publication, broke the book down by chapters, and organized the publication so that it had an About section and a Table of Contents.

I've done similar things with short stories. I've got one 15,000 word story broken into eight parts that I put up recently. It's doing ok. But it doesn't have it's own publication. It's in one of my own publications that I put my short fiction pieces into. This will be the longest I've ever done a series.

So, I've set up the publication for this new serialized novella, I've added the introduction - the About page - and the Table of Contents, which will get updated daily with new chapters.

One of the advantages of the publication dedicated to this novella is that I think people will be more likely to sign up to the "newsletter" to get updates about when new chapters go up. That means they'll be more likely to follow through and read the entire novella.

I think that having the novella on a dedicated publication on Medium makes it easier to promote, too. Instead of sharing a link to just a part of the story, I can share the link to the publication.

Medium hasn't been a place for longer works in the past but they have recently acquired Glose, a site/app for reading books. So, it is possible that they are more interested in books. I think that Glose will be interesting. But Glose is a pay by the book platform.

One of the advantages of publishing an entire book on Medium is that people can read some of the chapters for free. If you do a good job on those first few chapters, you can then get them to read the rest of the book. A try it before you buy it kind of mentality.

I know that lots of people say not to give away things for free. However, even Amazon is seeing how serialized fiction can have an appeal for readers when they get to read some of it for free. Their new app, Kindle Vella will be launching soon and readers will get three free chapters. If they want more, they buy tokens and can then continue with the book.

Unfortunately, they do have to pay by the chapter, which is similar to other serialized novel apps, like Radish.

With Medium, if they want to continue reading after the first five chapters, they will have to get a Medium membership. That's only $5 though and with that $5, readers can read everything else on Medium. Potentially, they could read other serialized books, too.

If enough people were reading serialized books on Medium, someone (like me?) could create a publication to highlight and bring attention to other serialized books and publications on Medium.

I'm very curious to see how this whole thing will turn out. I'll update here in a month or so when I have some data to report!