The 3 Things That Will Happen to Your Substack When You Publish a Serial

How my recent serial impacted my Substack stats

Photo by Micky White on Unsplash

Hello my lovelies, I thought I’d follow up my recent five-part serial story with a quick analysis of how Substack readers react to serials.

Do they scurry away or do they come running like a parched Oliver Reed to a pub craving a drink?

Well neither, but there are some clear patterns that come with publishing a serial story. This was my second serial and the trends were exactly the same as in my previous serial. My latest story was a five-part Nordic noir mystery called Who Killed Sanni? The story was 13,300 words long and, as I mentioned above, I split it into five parts.

Now, I haven’t found any Nordic noir on Substack, so I would argue that mine was the first ever Nordic noir on the platform, so I am a pioneer. Woo-hoo! But you’re not interested in that, what you want to know is what’ll happen to your Substack if you should ever decide to publish a serial.

So let’s get stuck in with what you can expect, backed up by data from my recent serial.

1. Your open rate will take a hit

There are three irrefutable facts in life: Elon Musk has a hair transplant, Donald Trump lies about how many floors his buildings have, and your open rate will decline if you publish a serial. Accept this.

The average open rate for my fiction writing had been steady at around 35%. It’s not amazing, but it’s not bad either. Considering that I write fiction, which doesn’t really lend itself to clickbait headlines, I’m happy with the 35% open rate. It’s also a good benchmark to compare to.

I kept the headline the same throughout the serial, just added the “part” after the headline with each new episode. As you can see, I started off with a 31% open rate for the initial episode (lower than my average) and then it dropped after each following episode.

Oh dear, how sad.

I think this makes sense though. We’re inundated with content and not everyone wants to read a long story. And let’s agree that in today's hyper-quick, snack-size content world 13,3000 words is a long story. Especially on a phonescreen.

2. Your views per episode will go down