Member-only story
4 Key Tips If You Want to Serialize a Novel on Medium
Consider your goals *very* carefully.
Every writer has a trunk novel (or two, or three, or four…) shoved in a file somewhere. For those unfamiliar with the term, a “trunk novel” is a manuscript that’s finished, and potentially very polished — but has never found a publisher, for whatever reason.
I have two trunk novels, written in my twenties. One of them, “Q.,” was loved by a few book editors and agents but never managed to land at a particular publishing house. Over the years, a few chapters appeared (in lightly re-edited form) as short stories in various magazines and anthologies; one even won a literary award. But the manuscript as a whole seemed doomed to trunk-dom, and I was okay with that — I was publishing other books, fiction and nonfiction, with a mix of big publishers and indie houses.
Then I had an idea: Why not serialize “Q.” on Medium? After all, I have a following on this platform. The idea of serializing a story had always intrigued me. So I gave it a shot, breaking “Q.” into chapters published almost daily over the course of June and July. I came away from the experiment with some tips in case you’re thinking of doing something similar.
