Last Wednesday, we hosted a workshop with Elle Griffin of The Novelleist to learn about how to serialize fiction on Substack.When Elle finished writing her first book, she began to research the best way to publish it, but what she found was distressing. 98 percent of books published in 2020 sold less than 5,000 copies, and traditional publishing offered few viable paths for less established authors to make a living. Elle summarized her learnings in a Substack post called, “The one where writing books is not really a good idea.” The article’s sharp analysis of the publishing industry hit a nerve, garnering the post more than 70,000 views.In the article, Elle analyzes online platforms like Wattpad, Patreon, Amazon, and Substack as potential alternatives to traditional publishing. She makes the case that while there isn’t yet a perfect home for fiction online, Substack presented the most promising opportunity to publish and monetize her serial novel. We asked Elle to host a Spotlight On because of the rigor with which she has approached serializing her fiction on Substack. Elle has also been uniquely generous to fellow writers in the fiction genre – finding and gathering nearly 500 writers in the Substack Writers Unite Discord group, and also spotlighting other writers on her own Substack.The transcript has been edited for length and readability. You can listen to the full interview as a podcast in this post. To sign up for future writer interviews and workshops, head here. Why did you decide to serialize your upcoming novel on Substack?After I finished writing my novel, I set out to do what every writer does: pitch it to agents. I pitched more than 120 agents, and they all rejected it.As I was going through that process, I realized why all these agents were rejecting my book. It’s a strange little gothic novel. It’s a book that will appeal to a certain kind of person, but it won't appeal to every kind of person.If you're a big publishing house, what you're looking for are blockbusters – the Dan Browns of the world who are going to write a novel that’s going to sell millions of copies. The publishing house takes 70% of those royalties, and that's how they fuel their business. Meanwhile, only 0.01% of books will sell more than 100,000 copies. In fact, 96% of books sell less than 1,000 copies total!Well, my book is definitely not a blockbuster. If I'm only going to sell 1,000 or 2,000 copies – because that's about as big of an audience as I can picture – how can I effectively monetize it? If I put the book up for sale on Amazon for $3 each, then my family and 100 other people might find it, and I'd make a couple hundred bucks.At the same time as I was researching the publishing industry, the creator economy was emerging. New tools are allowing creative people to monetize a really niche audience. It only takes 1,000 people paying $8 a month for a creator to make a living of $100,000 a year.Writers were tapping into the creator economy through Substack, but most weren’t writing fiction yet. I knew writers charging people from $5 a month up to $40 a month; on Substack, there were people earning millions of dollars a year. Here's this platform that already has the business structure ready to go, so I wanted to try it for fiction. If there are 1,000 people out there who are willing pay $8 a month to subscribe to my novel as a serial, then that would work out financially for me. I could fund my writing. After all, this isn’t a new idea. The Count of Monte Cristo, Charles Dickens, and more classic books were all initially serialized. How have you grown your email list so far?I started my Substack in February, and it has grown by almost 1,000 readers in the last two months.In trying to grow my audience on Substack, I figured the easiest way would be to learn from other Substack writers. I stalked everyone I could find on Twitter who used the combination of the word “fiction” and the word “Substack” in a tweet. I messaged them and invited t