8 Questions for... Simon K Jones

Spotlight on Write More With Simon K Jones

Simon K Jones publishes a science fiction detective serial called Tales from the Triverse. He's been serialising his stories since 2015, moved to Substack in 2021 and digs into the nuts and bolts of writing serial fiction on his weekly newsletter. 

1. Why Substack?

I started out publishing fiction on Wattpad, back in 2015. I was still finding my feet as an author and it was a good way to immediately connect with readers and find my voice. Over time I became increasingly aware that I wasn’t really building an audience, but borrowing a tiny portion of Wattpad’s, which I had to give back every time I finished a project.

When it came to gearing up for my fourth fiction serial, I looked around for alternatives. I can’t remember how it came about, but I ended up interviewing Elle Griffin for a podcast I was producing at the time. That was mid-2021, and it’s when I first heard about Substack.

I’d run a sporadic, one-email-per-year newsletter on Mailchimp for over a decade to about 100 very confused people. Finding Substack is when the idea of me writing a newsletter finally made sense.

2. How long did it take you to find your groove?

Ages! Actually, your question implies that I have found a groove, which is generous. And what’s the difference between a groove and a rut? Feels like a subtle but important detail.

The first year I was definitely flailing. It was the first time I’d tried writing a regular non-fiction newsletter alongside my weekly fiction. For starters, I had no idea if I could pull it off in terms of workload. I also wasn’t sure if it would make sense to people. Would writers looking for advice be interested in my fiction? Would fiction readers get annoyed by all the writing-about-writing?

The other problem is that I was coming from that Mailchimp mentality, which encourages a very corporate tone of voice and design approach. I’d worked on newsletters at work for ages, which were always very product/sales focused. If you look at my early Substack newsletters, they have a bit of that vibe. That sort of generic professionalism that sounds like an AI wrote it. It took me a while to just be ‘me’.

There was a lot of trial and error and constant iteration at the start. There were lots of fiction writers in the same position in 2021/2022, so it felt like a joint effort.

3. How has it changed you?

Writing consistently and frequently almost inevitably makes you a better writer. It’s that 10,000 hours thing. You still need to study and understand the fundamentals, but ultimately I think the best way to improve is to simply do a lot of whatever the thing is.

At the same time, the newsletter has grown. And unlike my previous audiences on Wattpad, or on YouTube or social media, the newsletter audience is much more personal and meaningful. The people who chose to subscribe did so on purpose, and they can follow me no matter what newsletter service I happen to be using.

The growth is thrilling, and it’s the first time I’ve had any form of success in terms of having people pay to read my stuff. But that brings with it a certain pressure, and responsibility. The risks are higher. There’s further to fall. It feels less like a hobby now, for good and ill. I’m not complaining, obviously, but it’s definitely a shift.

Clicking ‘send to everyone’ has different implications when it’s 34 people compared to when it’s 3,400 people. I suspect my brain hasn’t properly absorbed some of this. 2024 is going to be an interesting year of coming to terms with what all this means.

4. What mistakes have you made?

I was used to Wattpad, which handles serial fiction fairly well for readers. Substack is more geared up for individual essays and articles, so while someone might subscribe to your newsletter, Substack’s core design assumption is that each newsletter is a standalone thing.

It took me over a year of tinkering to end up where I am now, with a neat table of contents, useful previous/next chapter buttons, a little TV-style ‘previously on…’ teaser, the intro paragraph that functions like an opening credits narration. A lot of that framework is based on television, rather than books. It provides a welcome mat for new subscribers and nice quality of life stuff for regular readers.

For the first year, I’d say, I got all that infrastructure around the words completely wrong.

5. To pay or not to pay?

There’s two sides to this. It’s the first time I’ve given people the option to pay me for my writing. For the first two years nothing really happened, and I kept fiddling with the model: paywalling everything, then going early access, then putting behind-the-scenes stuff behind the paywall. Eventually I just put everything out for free, and that’s when the needle started to shift.

I get the feeling that my paid subscribers are there mostly for the non-fiction advice and experience stuff. Convincing people to pay specifically for fiction online is still really hard.

The other side is whether I pay to subscribe to other writers. And you can get a bit ouroboros with that, every writer paying other writers, such that none of us are making any money, and we’re just shuffling the cash from one person to another while Substack takes a slice each time and the pot gets ever smaller. That’s the cynical angle, at least.

I do have paid subscriptions to several newsletters, but there’s certainly a scale issue there. One newsletter from your favourite writer at $50 a year is great value and relatively affordable. Five newsletters from five more of your favourite writers is expensive. I think about this all the time, but the solutions are thorny.

Then again, I think there’s enough readers in the world to go around.

6. What artistic and technical choices have you made

In my fiction I’ve definitely developed a bit of a style for the newsletter. My chapters tend to sit around the 1,200 word mark. I think that’s enough to have some real substance, while keeping easily within a single sitting for the reader. Any longer and I start to compete for time with Neflix, and podcasts, and much more famous writers, and video games and so on, and I want to avoid that at all costs.

Being a serial, chapters tend to end on a question mark. Not necessarily a cliffhanger - I’m not writing the 1960s Batman - but certainly a hook to bring people back, one way or another.

My preferred type of serial storytelling is a long, over-arching plot made up of mostly standalone episodes. Each episode has a proper beginning, middle and end. 90s show Babylon 5 is a big influence in terms of serial structure. I’m less keen on the modern streaming service approach to story, which is all plot-plot-plot and leaves no breathing space. The stuff Netflix and Disney+ pump out tends to feel both over-long and rushed at the same time, I think because a lot of the creators working in those spaces come from cinema. They’re making eight hour movies, rather than eight-episode serials. There are notable exceptions, of course.

The story I’ve been serialising on the newsletter is my first aimed squarely at adults, too. If it was a movie it’d be an 18, or R-rated in the States. Figuring out those boundaries has been exciting and challenging, compared to the more YA-friendly stuff I’ve worked on previously. I feel more vulnerable as a writer.

7. What’s been the effect on your writing?

I write more than I ever thought possible. Which I suppose is a good thing given the name of the newsletter. Back in my early 30s I wasn’t writing consistently at all. I was frustrated and embarrassed to describe myself as a writer. Then I tried writing a serial and it clicked into place, but that was all I could manage for years.

Now, I still do a weekly fiction serial on Fridays, but I also write the regular non-fic newsletter on Mondays. I’ve just started doing a weekly re-watch of a classic 90s TV show and blogging that every week. This year I’m doing audio versions of most of it, which also go out as podcasts. I do occasional short video guides.

Writing a newsletter has developed and expanded my writing habit. What I do now would have seemed impossible to me a decade ago. In fact, it would have been impossible.

8. In it for the long haul?

Absolutely. I’ve been writing serial fiction since about 2015, so I feel like I’m already in the long haul for that. The newsletter game specifically I’ve been doing since 2021 and I love it. I didn’t expect to discover such a vibrant and diverse community in the newsletter and fiction newsletter scenes.

There’s lots I still want to do. I’m sitting on manuscripts from my previous Wattpad projects that I want to resurrect, edit, polish up, and re-release. I want to experiment with paid exclusive content, to see what happens. I also want to be able to do that without locking anyone out who simply can’t afford a subscription.

I’ve never thought much about the possibility of writing ‘for a living’. I’m a very long way from that concept, but for the first time it doesn’t feel wildly improbable. That’s a big change in the writing and publishing landscape. Even published writers that I’ve worked with over the years still have to keep a day job. If you’re not on the Lee Child or JK Rowling tier, writing isn’t really a sustainable thing. Fiction in particular.

But newsletters, subscriptions, Substack and all the other services…there’s a fascinating shift there. It’s incredibly fragile and could go pop at any moment, but that doesn’t stop it being thrilling right here and right now.

Thank you to Simon K Jones for joining this conversation.

If you’re a fiction writer and would like to take part, please email me.