Congratulations on your book, Mark. I'm one of the few people who like reading serializations on Medium. I looked forward to reading your new chapters every day. It was delightful reading.
I have also experimented with serialization on Medium. I have published chapters as I write them and also published material that I had already written. I even published an entire novel once. The results were horrible. Not even my regular readers read that novel. It performed worse than anything I've ever written on Medium; less than 10% of the views, reads, and claps I normally get on stand alone stories. And I got almost zero responses so there was no feedback for me to analyze.
But I didn't give up. I've tried a few serializations since then but none of them were successful. After my last attempt bombed I decided to quit doing that. I have bills to pay.
But I have to say that this article of yours has encouraged me. Perhaps I will give it a try again some day. Thanks for the encouragement.
I can say, though, that I did experience success at serialization once around 20 years ago. As I wrote a novel I published each finished chapter as it was completed. It was on a website that no longer exists that did not pay authors so I didn't make a cent but I was getting hundreds of views on each chapter. When finished I published the novel in paperback and ebook and it turned out to be my second best selling novel ever.
But success at serialization has utterly eluded me on Medium. I've been rather convinced that Medium may be the very worst place to publish serializations. Medium readers want to know that if they're gonna read a story that they will be finished with it in 5 minutes or less. The good thing, though, is that on Medium I might be able to make 25 to 60 cents per chapter so if there are 10 chapters I might make as much as six bucks. No other website that I've found offers that.
So I may try again some day and if I do I will definitely use your 'table of contents page' idea. I really like that. Thanks for sharing your process.
