[Essay]: "Fiction on Substack"

Compiled observations about reading and writing fiction on Substack, including some suggestions and a “Hail Mary.”

Photo by Olena Bohovyk on Unsplash

Introduction

Substack: does fiction have a place here, or is it merely tolerated? Is it like the awkward cousin who nonetheless, through familial obligations, is invited to stand in isolation at the party, permitted to converse only with the corner? Even in my short time on Substack, since February of this year as a writer and January as a reader, I’ve seen dozens of lamentations, desperate pleas to the void, of the plight of fiction on this platform. Almost uniformly, I’ve seen others say how their fiction pieces get much less attention than their catchy essays. (The one exception I can point to is myself: I have one essay that is, at the time of writing, my lowest viewed piece, while the others are fiction or poetry; a more recent essay breaks this minor trend a bit.)

Now, don’t get me wrong, fiction can and does do well here. But it certainly doesn’t do as well as the standard essay. In a laughable bit of irony, the #1 Bestselling publication under the Fiction tab (at the time of writing) is The Shit About Writing Team, which tells you all you need to know about how fiction is doing on Substack.

To emphasize this point, we can do a (crude) analysis of real data directly from Substack. Take The Metropolitan Review, a highly successful publication that has a mix of reviews, essays, and even posts occasional fiction. On July 3^rd, I took stock of 8 different publications from the most recent ones, and came up with the following numbers: (likes, comments, and restacks are labeled as L;C;R)

Essays:

1. Forgetting Atticus Finch – 6/20/2025 – (62 L; 11 C; 9 R)

2. The Risk of Serialized Reality – 6/18/2025 (65 L; 23 C; 52 R)

3. The French Exception – 6/4/2025 (74 L; 15 C; 15 R)

4. Will Conservatives Make Great Art Again? – 5/28/2025 (114 L; 28 C; 39 R)

Fiction:

1. In the Course of Developing Pet Names – 6/14/2025 (53 L; 15 C; 12 R)

2. Daddy’s Favorite – 5/31/2025 (33 L; 1 C; 9 R)

3. Novel Excerpt from Metallic Realms – 5/17/2025 (114 L; 28 C; 39 R)

4. Underground Cinema – 5/3/2025 (86 L; 8 C; 28 R)

Keeping score, that’s an average number of likes of 71.5 for fiction vs 78.75 for essays, number of comments of 13 for fiction, 19.25 for essays, and finally restacks: 22 for fiction and 28.75 for essays. Obviously I have no access to the view counts, but if these engagement numbers mean anything, I wouldn’t be surprised if these results correlated strongly with view counts, with essays expected to have higher view counts.

Of course, as a daylighting statistician, I have to barge in and remind the reader that this “study” has a million flaws, not least of which is its small sample size. But I think it generally makes the point: Essays tend to get more engagement on Substack than fiction pieces, even when looking at popular publications.

Another example comes from

The Republic of Letters

, which recently published a flash fiction piece (“Passing Time,” 34 L; 8 C; 5 R); comparing this to an outlier like “Chasing Kim L.” (111 L; 18 C; 19 R) is maybe rubbing salt in the wound.

The obvious question is why? Why is it difficult for fiction to gain traction on Substack? Is it a flaw inherent to the way Substack works, or is there a common set of mistakes fiction writers are especially prone to make that put them at a disadvantage? And, whatever reasons we accept, are there ways to give fiction its due helping hand?

In classic essay fashion, I do in fact have a thesis to propose, complete with three parts (though this was by accident): the problem is a mix of how Substack presents posts to readers, combined with the expectations and habits I’d venture many readers bring to the platform, these behaviors themselves reinforced by how Substack works. It’s an acknowledgement that a fiction mood and an essay mood are different and lead to vastly different decision making patterns when each encounters a new post.

I spent some time introspecting, paying more attention to how I felt and went about reading different kinds of posts here, by people I already follow or subscribe to as well as people new to me. I noticed immediately that the decision to read an essay was always easier to make than reading a fiction piece, and the decision to sit down with a fiction piece was easier, but not easy, if I knew the author. Essays tended to be an easier sell to me because it was not much of a cognitive load to see the post title, decide if I wanted to read it, and then finally read it. I found fiction decisions to have more steps than this: the title and image for the post almost never convinced me to read, but other people’s recommendations did. But even if I were convinced to read the piece, I would always save it for another time, when I knew I could give it the focus I wanted to give it. Unless it was a flash fiction piece—which was almost never obvious from the title alone—I never read a fiction piece the moment I found it on Notes.

Noting these experiences, I took off my “reader” hat and tried to see the problem from the other side. My perspective is only so reliable, however, as I am a “writer-reader;” the situation is probably different for non-writing readers. In any case, my field notes as a reader on Substack sank my writing heart: as a fiction writer myself, I consciously tried my best to support the fiction I believed in, but I repeatedly found myself overwhelmed, overloaded, and dissuaded from keeping focus. But once the wave of despondency and guilt washed away, I came to a flash of clarity that I hurriedly jotted down to mull over for a bit.

This is what I came up with: Fiction does have a rougher time of it here. (The first step is always to admit that you have a problem, no?) But, I’ll argue that with some minor tweaks or repurposing of features Substack already has, this writing haven can transform into a flourishing fiction factory, maybe like the world has never seen before. (This is me overcorrecting for my earlier dejection.) The three issues I noticed, bouncing between my reader and writer notes, are these:

- Titles don’t work the same way for fiction as for essays. This is a problem of promotion and discovery, because the title and an image are the only things visible to a reader as s/he glances through Notes.

- My mindset, or the way I mentally prepare myself to read a piece, changes dramatically between reading an essay versus a fiction piece, and an acknowledgement of this affects my deciding what to read and when.

- “I’ll get to it eventually”—saving posts for later is a great idea that is severely neglected and underutilized by Substack. Considering my own experience of reading fiction I’ve saved, improving these features could make reading fiction easier—the ultimate goal of resolving all these issues.

Let me explain.

Titles

Titles do not work the same way between fiction and essay posts.

In an essay, the title is meant to grab your attention, as it’s the first thing you see. This is true in theory for fiction, but not quite. The point of an essay title is to tell you what the essay is about, but fiction doesn’t have a corresponding, simple notion of what the piece is “about.” The fiction title has a different function. Yes, it should still be attention-grabbing, but this goal is subservient to another. This is where my fiction-writing philosophy makes its blatant entrance: the more important function of the title isn’t just to name the story but to serve as part of the story, either as a detail not mentioned in the text itself but nonetheless adds to the story, or as a clever thematic bow tied over the package.

This is getting abstract, so let me show you by concrete examples from my own pieces. Consider these two titles:

- [Essay]: “Literary Theorists need to reckon with their failures in the age of AI”

- [Short Story]: “The Gift of a Green Mood” (flash fiction)

Now, setting aside your own taste for these titles, it should be apparent that the two function differently, in terms of how they try to make you feel.

The essay title is relatively straightforward and clearly demarcates the central players on the stage of the argument: literary theorists and LLMs, and their heated clash. And, you might get a hint, from the strong “failures,” that the essay will have a combative tone (it does). Because there is a clear point to the essay, it’s much easier to convey that point in a succinct title.

Compare this to the short story title: “The Gift of a Green Mood.” The story is a flash fiction piece about a pivotal moment at a birthday party between two young boys that is sparked by a pain of jealousy of one boy to the other. “Gift” might make you think of a party, and maybe “Green Mood” might conjure up the idea of jealousy for you (“He was green with envy”—I don’t quite get it either, but it’s a common association). But in reality, even in the unlikely case that you conjured up those images by reading the title at a glance, there’s not enough information to get a real sense of what the story is and if it would interest you. Jealousy is never explicitly mentioned in the piece, and the ending is intentionally ambiguous; the title is a hint at the complex psychological toppling that occurs in the one boy, Michael. I chose the title because I prefer giving the reader a revelatory sense of satisfaction after having read, and maybe reread, the piece, and I value this over trying to grab him or her by the shoulders and shouting about how great my story is, like an aggressive seller peddling his wares. The full effect of the fiction title is in knowing what happens in the story—exactly the reverse of the essay title—and it’s difficult to see, without the benefit of hindsight, how much of the story, and the reader’s interest, could be anticipated by the title alone.

Of course, I’m one fiction writer of many on here, with my own bias about what titles should do, but I hope to have convinced you that titles for fiction and essay pieces function very differently. The problem with this is that both sets of titles are competing on the same battlefield for your attention, and by design the essay titles have a homefield advantage.

When I started lurking on Substack, the one consistent annoyance I had was that I wanted to know what kind of post I was looking at without having to open it and investigate myself. As I sped through Notes, was I looking at an essay, a poem, a short story? This is what motivated me to preface all my titles with what category I would assign the post: [Essay], [Short Story], [Poem], etc. It would be nice if Substack allowed you to do something like this automatically, and prominently display the post type in the link that appears in Notes¹.

Another issue I have is that the short description for the post does not appear when seeing it on Notes. I understand the UI can get crowded, but for fiction especially, this short description is usually where I find out the post is fiction in the first place, and it does most of the leg work in convincing me to read it.

Titles are powerful; they can summarize an entire piece, point the reader to a major symbol, or even give the thesis, but their power works differently if the post is fiction versus if it’s an essay.

Mindset

I consider writing a story to be like constructing a complicated contraption, one without any clear manual, or even a complete list of the parts you need. It’s why they call it “craft.” There’s a density of thought, of emotion, of associations that are conjured up in competent fiction that do not happen to the same degree in the common essay. (A deep-dive, creative nonfiction piece is an obvious exception.)

To me this means my brain is primed to read fiction with a level of care and attention to detail that is heavily dialed up compared to the mindset I have when I approach an essay. It is not that an essay is necessarily “easier to read,” but that the themes and central ideas and main takeaways are, by design, more readily accessible from even a cursory read in the essay than in fiction. Fiction too on the nose is boring and will not be widely read. The essay is afforded a candidness that is seen as shabby, passé, embarrassing in fiction.

In practical terms this means I’ll tend to spend more time per sentence in a fiction versus essay piece. I tend to reread more, either in its entirety or large passages, in fiction; and in general I think fiction takes much more effort on the reader’s part to feel like the reading time was worth it.

This is, of course, my bias as a fiction writer—I know how it can work under the hood and I try to learn something from each piece I read. I approach fiction with an intensity of concentration that, while different from what might be expected of the average, non-writer reader, I don’t think it’s too far off the mark of how people expect to approach fiction. I imagine the average fiction reader to be a capable, smart person, and it’s reasonable to assume that if I come to a fiction piece with this level of intention, so would at least one other reader.

In the same vein, a “15 minute” essay read is not the same thing to me as a “15 minute” fiction read. For my own, slow pace, I can easily take twice as long on a fiction piece as suggested by Substack. I’m a slower reader, so I don’t even trust the 15 minute estimate for an essay—but the estimate isn’t off by an order of magnitude as it usually is for my fiction reading. (This is all assuming that both the essay and the fiction piece are of sufficient quality to warrant this kind of intense, attentive style of reading.) If we as writers had access to data on how long each person spent reading a post, this idea of unequal 15-minute estimates could easily be shown: if I’m correct, and representative of the average Substack reader, then the distribution of reading times will be shifted to the right for fiction compared to essays.

By their differing nature, the short story and the essay require different styles of reading. I know going in that a short story, if it’s good, will use more of my brain than even the best essay, and will use more taxing functions, like vividly imagining the story, and this always makes me pause when I encounter a new fiction piece.

And in that pause, I send the short story to the Saved graveyard.

“I’ll Get Back to it”—Saved Posts

I’m not casting stones in a glass house here. I’m guilty of it, too: I always have a backlog of posts piled high in my “Saved” tab that grows at an uncontainable rate.

This Saved tab is also in direct conflict with Notes—the goal of Notes is to bombard you with posts that might intrigue you, while the goal of Saved posts is to have what at one point piqued your interest sitting patiently for your attention.

I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the unread posts in the average person’s Saved tab are fiction pieces—if they read such a thing—and that, on average, the fiction pieces stay in the Saved tab for longer than nonfiction or essay posts. This would mesh well with what I said earlier about the reader’s mindset going in to fiction—very rarely, unless it is obviously a flash fiction piece, and from an author I have high confidence in, will I read a fiction post as soon as I see it on Notes. You have to be a writer I love and trust for me to drop everything to read your fiction on the fly (a chicken or egg problem—how else do you develop trust but by reading?). I’m scrolling through Notes mostly in the idle moments throughout the day, which are almost universally not enough time to give the adequate attention the fiction piece likely deserves². And I’m a fiction writer who’s fighting for readers’ attention!

And so, the piece stays idle in my Saved tab until I consciously make time for it, which is hard to do when the addictive Notes already has me forgetting, if even briefly, about what I just saved, and soon enough I’m adding more.

I have a couple suggestions that could alleviate, though not solve, this problem. First, I wish you could make a custom reminder attached to a saved post, including the original note that got you to save the post. This would make it easier for me when I come back to them to remind me why I saved the posts, what drew me to them, what made me decide they were worth my time reading.

My other suggestion is to transfer the “archives” boosts in Notes to the Saved posts. Sometimes I’ll see a post from an author I’m subscribed to, and at the top will be the label “From the archives,” and I usually see this kind of post because the author has restacked it recently or it’s otherwise gotten a surge of recent attention. This is a good idea for resurfacing a writer’s backlog of posts (though, it could happen more often), and I think it’s an easy win to allow for your Saved posts to interrupt your Notes-scrolling in the same way. This would turn the conflicting, addictive nature of Notes on its head and repurpose it for the good of the Saved posts.

What advice can I recommend to other fiction writers? What about non-writer readers?

(I’m more so asking myself and answering to myself.)

I would say set your bar high for what you put in your Saved tab, if the long list overwhelms you. You can’t read everything you want, and that’s okay. Adding too many posts willy-nilly risks adding “noise” to the signal, conditioning yourself to ignore the Saved tab altogether, because you’ll likely not remember why you added a piece there from the title alone—especially for fiction pieces! (But like I said earlier, I think custom reminders on Saved posts could alleviate some of this.)

You need to accept that, like going through your unread books, you need to make time to make progress on the posts you’ve saved. Don’t treat it as a chore; even a modicum of guilt can soil the process and lead you to slog through the Saved posts just for the sake of checking them off a list. Intentionally setting aside “Saved post Substack time” is a necessity.

I don’t know what to do from a writer’s perspective. The intuitive answer of flooding Notes with quotes from your pieces only adds to the problem. I personally have not noticed that my own restacking of quotes from a story gets many people to read it. (Though, there are a few notable exceptions in my case; those few times are worth the effort, but the satisfaction comes from knowing how difficult it is to convince people to read your fiction.)

Part of the issue, as I see it, is a lack of visibility. I have no data on my dashboard about the relationship between which of my posts have been saved by how many readers. (My hats switched again, from writer to statistician.) What’s the percentage of readers who save a post and then actually read it? How long, on average, is the time between saving and reading the post? How did the reader come across the post so that they decided to save it? I can’t hope to answer any of these questions because I have absolutely no data on Saved post behavior. This is important because a post with low views and low saves is in a much worse position (engagement-wise) than a post with low views but a large number of saves. The views piling up on the latter is just a matter of time—no doubt the views spike over the weekend or at night when people tend to have more time for reading—while the views on the former may never come unless I do something to boost it. That is, insight into saved posts can help me prioritize which wounded posts need the most mending.

A Hail Mary

I’ll close with an out-there suggestion: I think Substack should invest in its own magazine Print-on-Demand (POD) service. Imagine if you could collect posts into your own literary magazine, curating it as if you were an editor at a small press, and have that glossy-paged treasure in your hands. Imagine slowly building up your own stack of personally curated collections that you can keep forever, that you can take with you on the train, that you can come back to and highlight and annotate. I would love that. I’ve learned to adjust to constantly reading on a screen for Substack, but it would be nice to have the option, especially for longer posts (doubly so for fiction), to read in a physical medium every once in a while. And from what I’ve seen, I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way. I would gladly pay either a subscription fee or pay on-demand for this.

And imagine if you could add paid-only posts to your makeshift magazine—that would give Substack the advantage of running a subscription-based model alongside a pay-as-you-read model. It would give readers options. Maybe you’re not sure if you want to commit to a writer through a normal paid subscription, but you think one of their paid posts would convince you—you could add it to the list of posts in your own Substack Monthly or Quarterly and read away. If the writer gets a percentage of the sale of the POD magazine, and if posts on Substack started prominently displaying counts of “Included in a Substack Magazine,” I think it would be a win-win for readers and writers.

The revolution will be restacked and serialized if only we can make it easier for readers.

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If you liked this essay, and maybe feel guilty that you haven’t read my fiction, you can see a full catalogue of my posts in this Table of Contents. If you want a guide on where to start with Analog Stories, see this Start Here! post.

If you’re feeling generous, you can support me by buying me a coffee:

I’d love to know what you think about the post:

Cheers,

-Ricky

1. This idea and the others to follow, in regards to the display of a post on Notes, are premised on the conjecture that the post image is usually not helpful in deciding to read something, while at the same time the post image takes up most of the real estate.

2. Binge-reading posts doesn’t work for me; I can’t shake the uncomfortable sense of obligation, like completing a tedious chore, and I remember a lot less of what I read later on.