Are Your Stories Disposable?

Are writers publishing disposable stories and are platforms encouraging this?

There is so much written about promoting your work, so many self-proclaimed experts and so much bull-shit that you could spend the rest of your life reading it and never write another word.

Let’s get a couple of things out the way first:

I am not an expert marketer - I am a writer.

I publish my short stories and serials on Medium and Substack.

I do not earn a fortune from my writing: I do earn more than the price of a cup of coffee but won’t be putting a deposit down on a yacht anytime soon.

I started on Medium in 2021 and came to Substack in 2023 as I believed it to be a better vehicle for publishing serial stories. Why? Because there is a higher chance that a Substack reader will be a subscriber to my publication. To read most of my serial stories they will have paid money for that subscription. When I publish the next installment it will arrive in their inbox.

On Medium I will not know whether or not that reader has subscribed or followed me. When I publish the next installment it may disappear depending on the vagaries of an algorithm.

A lot of readers, especially of erotica, prefer to remain in the shadows, they do not want to engage or chat, they occasionally hit the like button, but mostly, they just want to read. That is great. I write my stories to be read.

My conclusion from this was that Medium was a good platform for one off, short, sharp stories. If a reader moved on, without following or subscribing after reading, I earned a few cents. There is a great community on Medium so I get a lot of engagement but this is mostly from other authors.

Like many writers my income from Medium has fallen off a cliff in the past months: I am not going to continue that discussion here as many other writers have handled it with more eloquence and knowledge than I can.

Why am I asking if your writing is disposable?

Platforms like writers who publish regularly. They love to put the latest new shiny stories and articles in front of readers. Articles may date, but most fiction is relatively timeless, so why is it so difficult to find it? Are our older stories effectively disposable?

On the plus side, Medium introduced lists which became a library. Writers can add their stories and sort the order (great if you are publishing a serial as you can put Episode 1 at the top). Readers and writers can create lists of writers’ stories to go back to. There is a recently read list in case they forgot.

It is difficult to find anything on Substack. Yes, there is a great search box on an individual Substack but it has taken me a year to work out how I see a list of who I have subscribed to and it still takes me four clicks and a scroll. You can use tags to create a page but you have no control as to the order stories appear (it is in date order so the finale of a serial appears at the top).

Your older stories are unmined gold to your new subscribers.

The Solutions

My stories mostly fit into two genres; Supernatural Erotica and Kinky/Sexy Short Stories. I released two posts over Christmas, one listing all the 'kinky' stories and one listing all the supernatural. I got 14 new free subscribers from The Kinky Collection (That's a lot - I usually get 1 or 2). I also got 4 from The Supernatural Collection.

It seems people become free subscribers for the Kinky Shorts and then delve into the Supernatural Collection and sometimes take out a paid subscription.

My plan is to release a Kinky Collection list post every two weeks or so and a Supernatural Collection list post in the intervening weeks. Hopefully I have read it right and the sexy shorts are the bait and the supernatural erotica is the hook.

I have also tried re-stacking 2-3 of my posts especially the older ones with a comment every 2-3 days. This definitely generates likes and new subscribers so I am becoming a bigger fan of this type of promotion.

I follow a lot of authors on X. All many of them show me is ads for their books. In order to get likes and reposts they like and repost other authors’ adverts for their books so their social media output becomes just a continuous stream of ads. Some occasionally throw in a picture of a pretty girl, a hunky man or a cute cat, but that is it. Would you watch a TV channel that was just adverts?

Yes, I am guilty too. It is so much easier just to repost or cut and paste your book adverts. The more I follow, and repost, the more my posts get liked or shared. But is this just a circle of mutual gratification? Are actual readers, the vast majority who are not authors, seeing any of this? I accept that authors are readers too and that readers of one author’s erotica might buy another’s but are we, as authors, wasting valuable writing time?

I have (almost) abandoned the cesspit that is X. Bluesky is a lot calmer but I have noticed a lot of people are liking rather than reposting so I am not sure it is having much effect. Re-stacking my free stories with a short excerpt or comment on Substack and copying and pasting those re-stacks onto Bluesky and X does bring in subscribers and followers; there is a noticeable peak every time I get off the sofa and do it.

The, ‘You follow/subscribe to me and I’ll follow/subscribe to you,’ trend is surfacing on Substack. Don’t do it - why? When I joined Substack I brought my email list of around 120 subscribers with me. These were people who had subscribed to read more of my free stories on my website. My first posts achieved an open rate of 50-70%, that’s around 70 readers. Now I have 500+ subscribers the open rate is 20-25%. Around 100 potential readers. If I succumbed to ‘You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,’ that ratio would be a lot less. Some of my subscribers have subscribed to 30, 50 even in some cases 100+ substacks so my emails are going to get lost in the blizzard.

There is one thing I dislike on Substack and that is a paywall halfway through a story. I try to avoid this. Either the whole story is free or there's a brief intro and then a paywall. For my serials I publish the first chapter free with a link to the contents page on my website which contains a blurb and sometimes some excerpts; there is more on that in How to Write (And Read A Serial Story). The idea is to mimic online what readers do in a bookshop: they look at the cover, read the blurb on the back page and maybe look at the first chapter.

What works for me may not work for you. I’m still learning so please add your ideas to the comments.