How Emilia Rose Got 10 Million Reads on One Story

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In this live chat, Emilia shares how you can start, write, market, and grow your serial! It’s a masterclass on all things serial fiction and you all asked some amazing questions in the Q and A at the end :).

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Live Chat Transcript:

Emilia Rose: [00:00:00] So welcome to the formula for 10 million reads story. Today we’re going to be talking about all about serial fiction. So I, serial fiction is like my favorite thing in publishing, so I’m super excited to share it with you. But before we get started, I just want to go over what is serial fiction in case you’re new to it or in case you heard about it here and there, but just weren’t really sure how it could fit into your publishing business or why people do it.

So serials. Tend to be longer works that are broken down into smaller installments that release over an extended period of time. Usually, we’ll talk a little bit more about this, but usually the chapters are like 1, 000 to 2, 500 words each. So very short, usually like a scene with a cliffhanger at the end, and they release one at a time.

It’s used to keep people engaged and to create superfans and build a fandom. Who [00:01:00] writes serials, literally, any genre romance, RPG, fantasy, we’ll see a, an example of each of those in a second but any genre, specifically ones that allow for good and continuous cliffhangers. And it’s really good for authors who like writing in one world, typically with the same main characters, but you can switch around between couples, I do, and my readers are completely fine with it.

Okay, next. So we have a few success stories that I want to briefly talk about so you guys know that this can happen in any genre and it’s not just romance, which is tends to be the genre that a lot of people talk about when talking about serials. In Lit RPG, there is a story called My Vampire System, and it has 76.

1 million reads on Webnovel. It also got turned into an audio, serialized audio book [00:02:00] on Pocket. fm, and it’s hit 13 million plays. I believe this book has 2, 000 episodes or 2, 000 chapters, so it is huge. You don’t need that big of a novel or serial to, do well. But when you have that many chapters, you just always collect readers.

The next one, Romance, one example is Torn Between Alphas. It has 2, 000 million, er, 200 million reads on Radish. And then for fantasy, I did a TV show example Game of Thrones, I’m sure some of you may have heard of it but it’s on HBO, there was several seasons and some spinoffs, and the show gets millions, or when it was at its peak, it got millions and millions of views, probably per episode, and everyone was waiting for it to come out but that’s a really good example of serialized fiction in fantasy, romance, and RPG.[00:03:00]

So a little bit about me. Second, let’s see. Sorry. I’m just going to admit everyone. Okay. A little bit about me before we get started. So My background is in surreal fiction. I calculated it a couple days ago, and I think I officially passed 10, 000 hours just doing surreal fiction in my career, which is pretty cool.

So I’ve been working on surreals for five years. It’s where I started publishing and how I continue to publish today. My views across two different pen names have reached 70 million reads on all my stories. I have experience with several different serial fiction apps, and I’ve made multiple six figures per year just on my serials.

And in this presentation, we are going to go over why did some of the stories that are serialized do better than others? Why did some of the stories that A couple [00:04:00] of the stories hit 10, 20, 30 million views and some of them hit less than a million or a few hundred thousand. We’ll definitely talk about that today.

But just overall, serials, the ones that tend to do well are ones that are packed with Good tropes that are hot. There are a lot of different other reasons but that is one of the main reasons why the tropes, or some of the books that hit that 10, 20, 30 million views on serial fiction platforms did so well.

And we will break that down. Okay. Next, we are going to compare serials versus books. How are they different? How are they similar? Let’s start with the similarities. For books. Or for both each book or season can follow the same characters or different characters in that serial. Also we usually have an overarching problem per book or per season.

There might be multiple problems [00:05:00] woven into a serial but overall, in one season of the serial, there’s going to be one huge problem that happens. And then the next season or the next book, if you’re releasing a series is going to have another problem and then it just continues and for both books and both and serials cliffhangers are going to help a lot with read through and I know there’s so many people who are like, I hate putting cliffhangers in because my readers hate them.

But I would love to ask you, do your readers really hate them, or do they just get super annoyed because they might not have the next chapter right now, or the next book right now? Cliffhangers tend to do really well for books. Yeah, as long as it’s not the main character’s love interest, if you’re writing romance, dies.

People might hate you if you write that kind of cliffhanger. But yeah, cliffhangers are going to help a lot, whether you’re doing a book or whether you’re doing a book in a series [00:06:00] or a serial. So how are they different? Let’s start with serials. Serials tend to have less description and way more action.

Like I said before, we have thousand word, thousand to 2, 500 word chapters. In books, you could have the chapter be like thousands upon thousands of words, maybe 10, 000 words. And when you’re having those bite sized pieces, those bite sized chapters, you can’t really go much into description. You can describe a little bit, but you can’t describe.

You can’t probably describe every single little detail. It’s very high paced, very, this is the scene, this is what happens, and here’s the cliffhanger, and then here’s the next scene, here’s what happens, here’s the cliffhanger. They’re going to be faster paced, because they’re shorter, you have to get right to the point.

Also, in a serial, we talked about one main overarching problem per season. But, [00:07:00] there’s usually multiple problems scattered throughout the book. You might have a smaller problem between chapter 1 and 5. And then chapter 4 another problem might pop up before, before problem 1 has been resolved in chapter 5.

You have multiple problems throughout the series, or throughout the serial, where you The reader is constantly hooked. Before one problem is solved, three more problems pop up, and there’s no resolution at that time. It just keeps going and going. The character gets in more and more trouble, and the reader’s like how’s anyone going to get out of this?

Next for serials, we have multiple characters. The serial can follow. One couple or one person or a group of characters, but usually you have multiple characters like problems You have multiple characters scattered throughout the entire serial. So that way you weave these characters in maybe [00:08:00] you Kill a character you have five more characters.

You can take have them take that character’s place you have five more lives more problems to Dive deeper into with your main character And then, another thing for your serial, not all plots are going to be resolved by the end of the season, and they shouldn’t, because you need that cliffhanger. You need problems where readers are going to be like, I don’t care how long I have to wait, I don’t want to wait at all, but I will wait for the next book or the next serial because I want to figure out the resolution to these problems.

Now let’s look at book series. We’ll go through this one a little bit more quicker. Books can have chapters that are really long. And they tend to have a lot of description. Which is completely fine. But if you’re writing a serial readers don’t really enjoy, most of them, don’t really enjoy [00:09:00] long descriptions of things.

Books tend to be a little bit slower paced, and they have longer chapters. They usually follow one main problem. So instead of a bunch of little problems that make a big problem, there’s just one big problem that’s happening throughout the entire book. They usually follow one to two main characters.

It’s going to depend a lot on genre, so just keep that in mind. And then for a book, all plots are usually resolved by the end of it. Again, some may not be, and that’s totally fine but those are differences between serials and books. If you have any questions, you can leave them in the chat, but I will probably get to them at the end of this, just so we can get through it.

Okay. Big question, why do readers read serials? So your serial readers, your serial audience is going to be a lot different than your book readers, book [00:10:00] audience. Because of those main differences that we just talked about. The chapters are going to be a lot smaller, a lot more digestible. And your typical serial reader may not have time to sit down and read an entire book.

It’s going to be hard to get through for some people it’s hard to get through 10, 000 words in one chapter. They just want something quick, something bite sized, because they’re busy. And a lot of times people might be reading your chapter or your serial on the way to work. Or coming home from work, and they really want something that they could read in 5, 10, 20 minutes.

And a 10, 000 word chapter in a book might not be it. They might want something a little bit that’s a little pick me up here and there. Another reason why readers read serials is because there’s constant action and there’s not boring descriptions. I know, me personally, I prefer serials over books because I don’t really like reading descriptions.

I skip over [00:11:00] them and I just want action. And a lot of serial lies or serial readers just want action. They don’t care about the description. They have their own view of what the character looks like in their head. And they’ll get bored with what a couch looks like or what kitchen looks like or whatever it might be.

Another reason is there’s constant cliffhangers and constant engagement. In a book, chapters tend to wrap up quite nicely. You resolve everything by the end of the chapter. But when you’re writing a serial, you have You’re constantly getting up to a point where it’s almost the climax, and then it cuts off and readers are left wanting more.

And when they want more, they’re going to stick around to the next chapter so they can get more. But the next chapter, that also has a cliffhanger at the end, and they’re left wanting more and more. So they’ll stay to continue to read. And then there’s [00:12:00] also a big community behind serials. It’s really cool to see how tight the community is when you’re reading serials.

And this is mainly because readers can interact with each other within the book. You can leave comments within the story and people can respond to those comments and just experience the serial altogether, where that is a lot difficult, a lot more difficult to do when you’re reading a book on a retailer.

You don’t have that connection with anyone else. It’s like a solo experience. You’re sitting there, you’re reading the book, you’re enjoying it, but it’s by yourself. There’s not a community behind it unless you’re going to a Facebook group for the author or TikTok or wherever it might be. Okay. Let’s see.

I’m just going to Okay. Serials are currently reaching [00:13:00] 100 million readers, and it’s growing. Before we break down what, what’s in a good serial, I just want to hit this point home going off of our last slide. The rise of serials comes really with a new generation of mobile first, community loving readers.

And these readers are really looking for a place where they can talk with other readers and experience a book and experience all the emotions and feelings that come along with it with other people. And that’s why serials are one of the fastest growing areas of publishing a little bit over 20 percent per year and readers cannot get enough of them.

So how should you structure your serial? To make readers want to come back for more and more. How can you create a book that hits 10 million reads? Not just once but multiple times. So let’s get into it. So this is how you should structure your serial. This diagram may look like how you [00:14:00] would structure a book.

But you’re going to structure each chapter this way. You are going to have the rising action of your chapter build up to a big problem that’s happening. Build up to a scene. Then you have the climax of the chapter. But before the climax, you’re going to cut off. and put a cliffhanger.

So before people can, I don’t know, let’s take for example let’s take an example of a fantasy. A dragon spoops in and the chapter is cut. You don’t know what happens. On this battlefield all you know is a dragon is now here. You don’t know what’s going to happen with a dragon, if it’s a friendly dragon, if it’s going to burn everyone and everything, but as a reader, you’re invested and you want to know what happens next.

So that climax is going to happen in the next chapter. And then you’re going to get a little bit of falling action in the next chapter. Maybe the dragon kills a bunch of people or burns a bunch of people. So that would be like the falling [00:15:00] action. And then maybe the main character finds his friend almost dead.

And that is the basically rising climax, rising action and climax of chapter two. And then you cut it off there, not knowing if. The friend dies or lives, and the reader has to keep reading. Sorry, I just came up with that example on the top of my head, but yeah, this is how you’re going to structure every single or most of your chapters.

You have rising action, stop. Next chapter is climax, falling action, rising action again, stop. This is really going to hook readers and keep them engaged. You do not want them to stop reading at all. Usually in a book, you want to wrap the chapter up nicely. In a serial, you don’t want to be nice. You’re going to continue to hook them and hook them because you want them to read for how many chapters you want or you [00:16:00] have.

So if we go back to the lit RPG example with my vampire system, that has 2, 000 chapters. If all those chapters tied up very nicely, people would probably not read all 2, 000 of them. They’re there to figure out what the problem is and find the resolution of the problem over and over again. So falling action comes in the next episode and there’s no explaining what the cliffhanger means.

So if you have a really big cliffhanger, don’t at the end of the chapter be like just don’t explain it, let your readers figure it out for themselves, let them contemplate what it means in the comment section. They are there because they, they want a story, they want to figure out what’s happening by themselves and they can do that.

Next, crafting your serials. Overall, what is this going to look like? This is going to be shorter chapters, like we [00:17:00] mentioned. A thousand to, I’ll say three thousand words max. Probably more around a thousand to two thousand, two thousand five hundred words. Anything longer than that can be a little much for serial readers.

You want cliffhangers and something that we haven’t talked about yet is author notes. So author notes in serial fiction, they happen usually right after your cliffhanger. And an author note is you’re breaking like that wall between you and the reader and you’re saying. Hey, this is a note from me, the author, to you, reader.

I hope you love this chapter. I know it left off on the biggest cliffhanger ever, but what do you think is going to happen next? What do you rate this chapter? What do you want to happen to the villain? Stuff like that gets the readers engaged, gets that community going. And gets people really interested in the story and trying to figure out what things mean what does the cliffhanger mean, how is this going to end, there’s so many problems happening, how can this be [00:18:00] resolved in the next three chapters?

So really focusing on building that community aspect through those author notes, and once people start to feel comfortable. Coming up with their predictions and not only coming up with their own predictions, but commenting on your book like commenting within the story, they’re going to feel more comfortable talking to other readers.

And when they feel more comfortable talking to other readers, your community is going to grow. And you may have fostered it a little bit by leaving the author notes, but as your community grows bigger and bigger, your readers are going to like. You don’t really need to have that big of a presence in your community because your readers are going to step up and there’s going to be some people who comments and respond to everybody.

Everybody’s comments and predictions and it’s really interesting to see, but overall how to craft it. You got short chapters, rising action [00:19:00] no climax. Until the next chapter cliffhanger and an author’s note.

Releasing your serial. What you’re going to do once you have a few chapters written of your serial, you’re going to set up a release schedule. Why are you going to set up a release schedule? Because you want your readers coming back at a specific time. Every single day, every single week, every single month.

You want them to know when to expect a chapter because that’s going to build trust. It’s going to really help your readers know when to expect things from you. And I would shoot for at least once a week. If you’re going to do this in a serialized format, at least once a week. Remember, these are short chapters.

They can be completely rough, unedited chapters. I know that’s scary. Okay. But once a week, you’re, you set some time aside to, to write a chapter and release it at specific time on a specific [00:20:00] day. I would actually say, hey, I’m going to release a chapter at 2pm every single Monday. And your readers, what they’re going to do is they’re going to plan their entire day around your chapter release on Monday.

And I know that sounds so weird, like, Why are they planning their entire day around your release? I don’t know, but they do. And if you don’t release, they’ll be messaging you and asking if you died. And obviously you didn’t, or hopefully you’re not. But they really, they’re just, they’re expecting the story.

And once you have a strong enough community, They’ll also really care and worry about you too. So yeah, make sure you are having specific day and time every single week. And then when you’re releasing your serial, you’re going to shoot for lots of engagement. When me and my team released a serial, we aren’t looking at the number of reads.

We’re looking at how much engagement is happening in the [00:21:00] story and in specific chapters. And why do you want engagement? Or let’s talk about what engagement looks like. So engagement could look like reads. But it also looks like likes for a chapter, it also looks like comments, it also looks like how many people are responding to your author notes.

All those are engagements, and why do we want that for some serial fiction platforms, it’s really going to help you with their algorithm there. The algorithm is going to say, Hey, look, all these people suddenly read this book or read this chapter and they’re all commenting on it, which means it must be really good.

And when more people comment on it. It gets pushed higher and higher first for some platforms. Engagement. Also, though, it helps you create a better story so you can identify with the comments. You can identify what thread or character readers are really interested in. So maybe you have a side [00:22:00] character in your serial and you were like, I don’t really know how I feel about him.

He’s not really I don’t know. He’s just there. But if your readers are really into him, you can have him pop up continuously throughout that story to keep them happy. So maybe you were planning to have him only on chapter 1 to 5, he shows up. But if readers really connect with him, you can have him show up in chapter 5, maybe chapter 10 again.

And readers might be thinking, oh, he’s never gonna show up, and then he pops up, and they’re like, oh my god, I can’t believe he’s here! He’s here! And so it can really help you figure out which characters sign character story you wanted to delve into a little bit more to keep them engaged and coming back for more.

It also helps you identify possible plot holes so you can dive deeper into that plot. Something that I’ve noticed personally with my writing and in serials is I write live so I don’t [00:23:00] have any Yeah. Yeah. outline when I write. I literally write my chapters the day before. I would not recommend this.

Make sure you have a solid plan. But writing the chapter the day before I’m supposed to release it on that schedule works really well for me. Because I can look at the previous chapter’s comments and be like, Oh I think I dug myself in a little bit of a plot hole. And I might not know how to get out of it, but I can start figuring a way out.

I can maybe. not go the way I was planning to go and go in a different direction that kind of explains the plot a little bit more and digs deeper into the character or digs deeper into why an event is taking place. And it really helps me. strengthen that story. And then also more comments tends to mean that you have a bit of a stronger community.

And a stronger community can lead to more [00:24:00] monetary support. So we all want to be paid for our writing. Even if you’re releasing your serial for free, you can and you should be paid. And we’ll be talking about that, not this slide, but in one or two more. So you have your serial now, you’ve written it. You’ve decided on your release schedule and what your the stats may be that you’re looking for, but how are you going to market it?

So the first thing I’m going to say is your serial markets itself. And you might be thinking, wow, that’s like crazy. Like why, how first. Good writing. You want to always focus on making your craft better. But I’m going to dive into my favorite Game of Thrones example. So I’m going to tell you about Or let’s think about Netflix and how they tend to do, their model is dropping entire seasons at one time.

So Netflix drops a [00:25:00] season and they might drop it on Friday night. You, your family, you’re all excited for it. It’s so hot. Everyone’s talking about it. So you watch it on Friday night. You watch the entire thing. You binge the entire season in one go, one weekend. And you are super hype about it because you’re like, oh, this is the best show that’s ever existed.

I can’t believe I can’t believe they dropped the entire season at one time. This is so cool. There’s 10 hours of episodes that I can just watch and then you go to work on Monday and you talk to all your friends about it who also all saw it and you’re like, oh my god, this is so cool. And you might share memes or gifs or videos about it online.

And that happens throughout the week. And then you get to Friday again, and Netflix has another show for you to watch, and so you forget about show number one and you’re watching show number two now, because show number two is now this is the hot show. You need to watch it. So you watch the entire season again.[00:26:00]

You forget about show one, Monday comes around, you are, you’re talking to your friends, you’re talking to your co workers about this new show, and meanwhile, show number one, that’s last week. If we compare this though, to Game of Thrones, or to the serialized model of how HBO released Game of Thrones They released one episode every single Sunday night they released an episode.

You watch it, your entire family watches it, all your friends, maybe you have a party, whatever it is. You’re watching this episode, it’s packed with so much action. There’s not too much description, there’s not too much of anything, it’s just a lot of action happening. And then you get to the end of that episode, and there’s a cliffhanger.

And you’re just like, oh my god, I don’t want to wait until next week. But you have to wait until next week in order to get the next episode. So you go to work, you’re talking with all your friends. You’re creating predictions about what could [00:27:00] happen. And so throughout the entire week, you are talking about the show.

And then Sunday comes along, and you watch the next episode. And the next episode also has a cliffhanger. And so week two, you’re talking, you’re still talking about the show. And Game of Thrones tends to be 10 episodes long. So instead of Netflix, where you’re talking about the show for a week, you are now talking about Game of Thrones, a serialized TV show for two and a half months.

So the fandom can build over that two and a half month period instead of just in a one week. Surge. So that’s how the serial is marketing itself, the way it’s released, it always has the ability to bring in new readers or new watchers, new listeners, whatever it might be. And the community is built over an extended period of time instead of just a quick, quick thing here and there.[00:28:00]

Also, when you’re marketing your serial, you want to be consistent. Again, we talked about release schedule, releasing on the same day, same time, every single week. That’s how the Game of Thrones was set up. You knew exactly when to, when it was coming out. Every single week, people had entire parties for one episode.

And, like you may have had a party for your favorite favorite TV show, whatever it is, that came out your readers are going to plan their entire day around these chapter releases. So they’re super excited For that. And then we’re going to go back to the marketable tropes for your cereal that I talked about a few slides ago.

So marketing your cereal in order to not only reach hundreds of thousands of people, but to reach 10 million people. A lot of it is. Going back to how the serial is released how it markets itself when you’re consistent, but [00:29:00] it also has to do with crafting your serial in a way where it hooks readers who are serial readers.

In your genre, so every platform is a little bit different with serials and serial readers and what they prefer. And we talked about what serial readers prefer versus book readers. They want those short snappy chapters, those cliffhangers, even though they might not say they do. And you also want to weave in marketable tropes.

So I was talking in a serial Q& A I want to say an hour ago now, and we were talking about how tropes in, on retailers may be a little bit or slightly different than tropes on serial fiction platform. For example, I write werewolf romance and my book that hit 10 million views on serial fiction platform.

Those readers aren’t really looking for [00:30:00] Let me frame it like this. They’re more looking for werewolf romance where like the alpha of the pack is super toxic. He has like no redeeming characteristics at all. He’s just like super toxic And he takes what he wants when he wants. But readers on retailers, I, before I put it on a retailer, I revised it a little bit and I added more description to it.

And I added characteristics to this alpha, like toxic character where it shows a little bit of a softer side to him. And so those two audiences, yes, they’re looking for that same side. main male character where he takes whatever he wants, but they have a little bit of a difference in what they want to see.

So one may want to see just full, he’s just toxic, and there’s just a lot of action going on and on. The other group You may want to see a little bit more of character, kind of [00:31:00] expansion, character development a little bit deeper. And that goes back to understanding the tropes not only in your genre, but the tropes that are hot in serial, in un serialized formats, and then tropes that are hot in book, retailer formats.

We’re going to talk about your serial growth loop and how it is going to look. So you’re going to write and publish an episode of your serial. This is just basically summing up what we talked about in the past few slides. Write and publish an episode of your serial. Your existing readers of that serial finish the episode and they’re gonna interact with your story.

That means like they’re gonna comment on it. They might share it. They might like it. Whatever it is. Then you as the author, you may reply to those comments and your readers are gonna be like, Oh my gosh, like my favorite author just responded to my comment I left on her story. I [00:32:00] want more of my friends, more people to see the story because he or she is so awesome and I love their stories.

So they’re going to share it with their friends online and then more readers are going to discover your serial and they’re going to wait for the next chapter to release.

Okay monetizing your cereal. So there are a few different ways that you can monetize your cereal and I would recommend even if you’re releasing your cereal for free, you should monetize it in some way or some form. The main way Or the more traditional way I’ll say that a lot of reading apps have monetized are through microtransactions.

Microtransactions are basically they come in the form of coins or tokens and readers pay a few cents here and there. to unlock each chapter. And if your serial is really long, this could work really well for you because a few cents can [00:33:00] equal hundreds of dollars just to read one serial or one book.

I, this, microtransactions are great. How I specifically would recommend that you monetize your stories and your serials are through subscriptions. And subscriptions are like one of my second favorite thing in publishing. Basically, I love serial fiction subscription funnels because they’re so so easy.

And I’ll explain it in a second. Actually, but the next slide, but you can think of a serial fiction subscription funnel as if you’re having a reader magnet. It’s a free reader magnet that makes you money. It’s crazy. But serialized or serials monetized by subscriptions, you’re going to push hard for early access.

And what does that look like? I’ll go back to the previous side in a second. I just want to show you how this funnel is going to look like from a free serial to a paid [00:34:00] serial. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to release chapters one through three completely for free. So anyone on the internet can read them.

And when I say one to three, that’s not like you have to do chapters one through three. You should find a place in your story. It might be chapter five. It might be chapter seven, where readers are hooked and there’s no going back. And that should be your cutoff point. So anyway, chapters one through, in this example, three are free.

And so your readers are getting hooked. Chapter 3, there’s a big cliffhanger, and you’re like, Oh my god, like the readers are like, Oh my gosh, I need to know what’s going to happen next. But they can still read for free, but now they have to follow you. So what does this mean? On Ream, this means that you have to, create an account and follow an author, and when a reader follows you, you get their email.

So now you have their email, You have, they’re in your community [00:35:00] and they’re reading chapter four for free as a follower, they’re reading chapter five for free as a follower, chapter six for free as a follower. Then you get to that cliffhanger on chapter six. It’s really good. It’s so good.

Your readers can’t turn back now. They can’t stop reading. Like they need to know what’s happening with these characters and all their problems. And so that is where you put up a paywall and you say, Hey one second, sorry. You say, hey, in order to read Chapter 7, you have to subscribe. So you have to be a subscriber of mine, a member of my community that’s paying me monthly, in order to read Chapter 7.

And maybe they read Chapter 7, Chapter 8 releases next week, Chapter 9, that’s a mistake, sorry, releases the week after that. And it’s a constant dripping of chapters out to specific tiers. At specific times and intervals, but I would recommend starting a subscription if you’re [00:36:00] thinking about doing serialized content, just because it is the only, at the moment, it’s the only way to get customer data, to have a really strong community and who, who doesn’t love reoccurring revenue?

It’s so easy. You just convince. your readers to pay you once and you provide them enough content where they don’t want to leave. They want to stick around. But let’s jump back here for a second. A couple other ways you can monetize your serial are through tipping. Some platforms allow you to tip or your readers to tip you because I don’t know, they like you.

We also see some bonuses, some reading apps. Offer bonuses to authors, I would just just look over their contracts before you move forward with them and make sure you have lawyers look over them. Because you shouldn’t really be basing your entire income off of bonuses because they can be taken away [00:37:00] and we see this all the time, especially like on retailers with Amazon.

Some people get bonuses, some people don’t and there’s really no rhyme or reason for it. And then also ad revenue. Some platforms have ways where you can insert ads into your story and you can get revenue from that. But the most common are subscriptions and those microtransactions where you unlock per chapter.

Cool. And this is pretty much it. The end of the major presentation, but yeah I’m, I hope you learned a bit from it. I try to pack as much information into there as possible and I hope it helps you grow from zero to a hundred million or a hundred million reads would be great. A billion reads would be great too but one million reads, that’s what we’re shooting for across different serial fiction platforms.

And yeah and if you’re interested in more information, we also created the million reads serial labs, which is 30 [00:38:00] sessions, five hours of video. But I am, let me, I think, I’m going to

Michael Evans: un spotlight you.

Emilia Rose: Perfect.

Michael Evans: You’re a little too big. I’ll go through the questions. We have a lot and we’ll try and get through them all which will be a challenge, but I know Amelia can do it.

Let me, Actually, I think we’re both spotlighted now. Okay, this is cool. We’re both spotlighted. So it’s not just you here. I’ll be the one moderating the chat, and then we’ll all be up here together. First of all, you all are great for getting in because we anticipate there’d be maybe a lot of people signed up and we want to get all the questions so Folks who like got in the first couple minutes, the folks who are here and able to ask questions.

So Monica, I think had the first question, so I’ll go in order of the questions mostly. And I think this is a great question to actually start with because writing serials, right? A lot of us, including yourself, [00:39:00] after we may be published in a serial platform. Also publish that same story in a novel format and a retailer, or maybe put it for direct sale on our website.

But when we do that, do you have to add a ton of description and pacing back in what are you literally just taking the chapters you published and, Recovering it, putting on a retailer, or is it a different process? How does that look like?

Emilia Rose: I think it depends. I, I know my first story that I bundled all up and put onto a retailer.

I did do a lot of editing. And I added those different descriptions and stuff. Now, honestly, I don’t do any of that. I literally send it to my editor. She edits it. I approve the edits and put a cover on it and put it on Amazon. So you don’t, if you feel like the story needs it, you can add stuff and you can take stuff away.

But it’s not essential because of the way serials. are written. You have those cliffhangers at the end [00:40:00] and the cliffhangers will help read through for your book on retailers as well.

Michael Evans: No, that makes total sense. I love it. And a great question from Leland which is, I know a really common question that a lot of us have, which is like, what is a bite sized chapter?

In word count? I know it’s a tricky question, but maybe if you have a range or something you can offer there?

Emilia Rose: Yeah, so I would, I think it’s gonna, it’s gonna depend on your genre. I would recommend anywhere between a thousand words and 2, 500 words. That tends to be the sweet spot for those bite sized chapters.

Michael Evans: Okay, I love it. And another question also from England, which is this one’s tough. It’s like a great question, but you might have a range of answers here. If doing multiple, right? So multiple genres, very importantly, do you recommend doing it all on one reading page? Or [00:41:00] would you do a separate page or pen name for each?

Emilia Rose: So if they’re like wildly different genres, I would say do a separate page for each but if there are like, Similar genres or I’ll just take like my business for example. I write romance I write one theme throughout My entire backlist, it revolves around or it talks about obsessed guys who are in love with insecure women.

So all of my books have that same general theme but they range from really light romance to really dark romance or fantasy to completely contemporary. And I mesh them all together under one pen name and one dream account. But if you have romance and then also lit RPG that’s not romance at all, I would separate them out.

So I think it just depends on how adjacent

Michael Evans: Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s great. [00:42:00] And I definitely agree with that as well. Now, this next question, I’m going to not skip, but highlight the answers. Cause I think y’all answered it for each other really well. Which is Alicia asked, where is a good place to read serials so I can discover some good ones?

And Leland dropped Reddit, which first of all, Reddit is like underrated in terms of a serial platform. And Reddit like obviously has a lot more than serials on it. If you’ve been to Reddit. It’s definitely not the only thing there, but specifically a lot of genres that don’t maybe do as well on what we’d more consider to be maybe a lot of the serial fiction platforms can do well on Reddit, like horror serials do well there.

There’s lots of different sub genres and niches that can do well there. And then of course you’ve got the Wattpad, the web novels, the world. If you’re into like audio serials, you could check out like podcast players. And. There’s lots of audio serials there. There’s obviously web tunes, there’s tapas for web comics.

There’s a ream there’s radish. There’s many platforms. [00:43:00] And there’s lots of cool places to check out where there’s also like always it feels like there’s so many nooks and crannies to like different places. You can find serials like Facebook, even like we had a writer on the podcast too.

He’s from Africa. I was writing to you on Facebook so you can find them everywhere, but y’all did a great job answering the question for each other. This next question is definitely one for you, Amelia. And recently I know why she’s asking this because she probably follows you on Facebook. This is Alexa asking, and she saw you talking about your interest slash move into the Japanese market, which.

She’s asking you, have you figured out how to attract Japanese readers yet? I know it’s early stage for, so the, the answer might be you’re not sure, but whatever you can share there and any advice or experience for not only Japanese but for Korean or Taiwanese audience. And Alexa mentions that she’s asking for a mega verse specifically, which I don’t think you have experience with the Metaverse specifically, but, oh, actually let you are unmuted or you’re on mute, I should say.

Emilia Rose: Okay, sorry about that. We [00:44:00] are doing very this is our research stage right now. My assistant is doing deeper research into the Japanese market, specifically for webcomics. Because we plan to translate one of ours, but I don’t have any information yet. As soon as I do, I will share it, though, because I think more people should should try the market out and try different languages and see which ones work best for, your specific genre, your niche, your readers.

Michael Evans: Totally. Probably makes sense. Next question from Veronica is how do you avoid or at least deal with the issue of every villain having to be bigger or stronger than the previous one in order to keep the rising action going every time? So I guess the idea that like, when you’re writing a serial, if that third climax isn’t bigger than the first, you’re not building towards something, right?

Like people are going to be like, Oh, that’s pretty lame. So how do you keep upping the ante?

Emilia Rose: So [00:45:00] me personally I use my readers comments. So this is what works really well for me is because I don’t have it all outlined ahead of time, and I’m writing the chapter that basically the day before it’s done, do like to schedule out I’m able to read previous comments and look at their like my readers thoughts about what’s going to happen.

A lot of them will make predictions. They’ll be like Oh, I think she is secretly a dragon, where I think she is, she has this power. And then I’m like, oh she can’t have that power now. Like they already think that she has this power. So I need to like, make, who she is or her secret a lot better or I need to add more depth to it.

So when it comes out, they’ll be so shocked. And so that tends to happen a lot where they’re like, Oh my gosh, I never would have guessed this. And I’m like, yeah, you guys did guess it. So I had to change it around a little [00:46:00] bit. So I, what works for me is using my reader’s comments and making the story better.

Because of their predictions of what’s going to happen. If that makes sense.

Michael Evans: It does. I think that’s also like part of where like each format of anything, like whenever you’re creating art story, the actual creation process is influenced by how you’re producing it, how you’re publishing it. And I think that’s one of those things that makes serials unique.

And I love it. My, he asked, how do you write similar question, but a series with cereals should we follow the same serial structure? Yeah. Enter that one first.

Emilia Rose: I think it depends I’m assuming you mean I’m just gonna assume it, I could be wrong you mean a series with different couples in each season because I think you write romance So if that’s what you mean how I do [00:47:00] it is I, or one of my most successful series of serials is an Academy Worlds where the first book was really popular tropes.

It got people into the world, but in book, in serial one, I wove in the characters for serial two. So the next couple, I wove them in very heavily. And then in season two, with couple two, I wove in characters from, that will show up in series, season three, sorry. And it’s it’s all the characters that show up in the next season the readers are already into them, already really want to know what’s going to happen in their book and their relationship.

And It’s really easy to get people to move from season one to season two from season two to season three Because they already have that interest in them.

Michael Evans: Love it. This next question is It’s [00:48:00] a very common one. I’m adapting the question a little bit because I think this author is mentioning that they’re lesbian romance author, which is beautiful, but their core question doesn’t have to necessarily do with their genre, their core question has to do, I’m getting started.

I don’t have any published books. Don’t have an audience. I want to do serials.

Where do I begin? That’s a very tough thing, right? I get it. Like when you’re, whenever you’re starting anything is hard, but what would be your advice or maybe even better, what would you do if you were starting over a new pen name again? And I guess technically you are starting a new pen name again when you go into a new market.

So what is that process for you?

Emilia Rose: I think it’s really understanding the serial, your genre in serials. So we talked about how the genre in serials. Could be, like, the tropes that are hot in serials may be a little slightly bit different than the tropes for those genres in books on retailers.

So really, reading a lot of serials that are maybe about [00:49:00] lesbian fiction or romance or whatever it is And really understanding what those serial readers are looking for. That’s like the first step that you should do. Second is, start writing the serial. Start putting it out there. You can do some maybe swaps with other authors where you’re all promoting a specific subgenre of romance or RPG or whatever it is together.

So you get some eyes on your book. And Adding those author notes in there so people start to engage and when people engage, respond to them. You can reach out to them and be like, hey, thanks for reading. And. It will really start building that community up and that hype up. And being consistent too is really important.

Consistently saying, Hey, every Monday at 12 PM, we’re going to release a chapter and just doing that will build trust.

Michael Evans: I love it. Christine asks, do [00:50:00] you also sometimes bundle several chapters into a separate book that readers can buy in? The answer from multiple authors was yes. Tisra says yes.

Leland says yes. Which, it’s great to have you both here. But, I’m gonna take it to the next step, which is, okay. Authors do that. But how do you do that? How do you know? Especially if you’re writing a serial. So many authors. I’m just gonna pick on, Royal Road authors. Which in a good way, right?

A lot of them are writing. Like a single story. Like when you click in, that might have five or 600 chapters, right? So there’s no there’s not like as talking about a series, there’s no series of books in the way that we think of series in that context, it’s just, you dive in and it’s a.

Endless serial. But when they go to the retailers, you’ll notice someone like shirt, a loon picking on him because he’s, probably the biggest slash it’s is really big right now too, but biggest author and subscriptions, he has many books in his view of vice monster series. So how do you know when to break up those books?

Like I have this ongoing serial, where do you go? Okay. This is book one. This is [00:51:00] book two.

Emilia Rose: Yeah, I think it’s. I think it’s going to depend. I know that I, I say that a lot. But I do think seasons in serials, they tend to have one big, maybe overarching problem. And once you get to the end of that problem, or once you get close to finishing that problem, that big problem you’ll know that, oh, this feels like it’s, wrapping up a little bit.

There might be other smaller problems that are emerging but if you like bundle that book up or that serial up into a book with that main problem and you might have to, you might have to reformat it a little bit or add some things here and there for retailers. But yeah, I think it’s definitely feel it.

You’ll, as you’re writing hey, this feels like it’s wrapping up for this specific problem. And I would group those books or those chapters out by [00:52:00] big overarching storylines.

Michael Evans: This is so much fun reading through all your comments, y’all. There’s so much good stuff here and we’re going to keep going and try and get through as many questions as we possibly can. So let’s go rapid fire now. This one’s from Leland. Do you have suggestions for good times to release?

Emilia Rose: Wait, what?

Michael Evans: I was gonna say chapters adding context to the question. Good questions, times to release specific chapters or episodes in a serial. Are there good days of the week, good times of day?

Emilia Rose: I think I think it depends again. Some people release early in the morning, so they get people on their commute to work.

Some people release like later in the afternoon where they’re getting people coming home from work and just need something to stress, relieve stress relief from the day. I think it’s just going to depend on your audience and how you want to structure your releases, especially if you’re releasing you’re writing the day of your release, like me, you might be you might not want to have an 8am [00:53:00] release, you might want to give yourself some time.

Michael Evans: Okay fully with you there. And then we have from Tom, Tom asks, can you publish the same serial on multiple platforms? I know that actually has different, it can be different depending on where you’re publishing. So maybe you go through a quick run through of what the rules are as of right now, as of your knowledge on specific places.

Emilia Rose: Yeah. So as long as they don’t have an excl, like a, an exclusivity clause, you can publish it wherever you want. And as long as you’re not bound to like KU. With that specific book, you’re able to publish it wherever, on whatever platform that you want it to be on. That’s a quick answer, yeah.

Michael Evans: Specifically Vela

Emilia Rose: Oh yeah.

Michael Evans: They definitely want you to keep, as of right now, and they have made a lot of changes and I try and follow them but to my knowledge when you publish a chapter on Vela you can publish it on other serial platforms, because [00:54:00] Vela is only available in the United States, but the trick is, it has to be behind a paywall, so a lot of authors will actually use Ream and Vela together, and U.

S. Vela, and then international is their Ream, right? So there’s a lot of things you can do. But one thing that I also would be really careful about with serial platforms, and it’s something like that we are very hesitant about is there’s a lot of different serial platforms that are out there.

But there’s a lot that can be very not kind to authors to put it lightly and can have, I would say, frankly, more abusive contracts. So if there is ever a city agreement, like there should be a little bit of red flag Amazon’s maybe an exception that I, there is a red flag, but it’s, they are the biggest game in town.

Whereas when other people are offering that that’s usually a reason for you to go, am I being like royally screwed here? And the answer is oftentimes yes. So do you watch out for those situations? There’s a lot of writers that we’ve talked to who are actively fighting sanctuary on other places because of situations on what can happen.

So just writer beware [00:55:00] and you can always share with other writers. Hey, is this normal or not? Next question. This is a really good one. Is, are there any examples of popular serial tropes? And Leland says that just search, what are the expected tropes for military science fiction?

Basically, serial tropes are, same as genre tropes oftentimes, but I’ll ask you, Millie, is there any kind of specific tropes that you’ve found In romance and the genres that you’re writing in romance that are like more popular with serial readers than they are on retailers. Is that a thing that like some tropes are like better in serials or is that not a thing?

Emilia Rose: I think werewolf romance or werewolf romance is huge in like wherever, but it’s really popular with. Serial readers super popular because you have that toxic, too toxic male that shouldn’t shouldn’t be as toxic as he is. But yeah.

Michael Evans: Neil asks, how do you help new subscribers get [00:56:00] caught up when they sign up after you’ve released a bunch of chapters? So I’m assuming Neil is saying, signing up for your subscription, so how do you get them caught up?

Emilia Rose: I just give them, honestly, I don’t do much. I just give them the link to the book that they should be reading.

And then let them take it at their own pace. Some readers are going to be behind, some readers are going to be like, read the chapter as soon as you publish it, like the second you publish. And just letting them go at their own pace, just because readers who sign up to your subscription, they might not be, like, whale readers, they might not be, they might not have the time to sit down and read 2, 000 chapters that you might have in your backlist.

So just giving them the options for, hey, these books have these tropes, these books have these tropes go take it yourself. You got it.

Michael Evans: Okay. Awesome. Awesome. I’m going to try and hit three more questions. Christine says, can you publish the same [00:57:00] series in two languages on Ream? And does that make sense at all?

Emilia Rose: Yes. You can. I have a Ream for German subscription, but so you

Michael Evans: make sense. Okay. Okay. Tom asks about What are sites that you’d opt to avoid? And I’m really not one to instead of maybe speaking in like a negative light about other places I’ll share with you a list of platforms I’ll share with everyone that We like, have used before that lots of other writers use and that like maybe don’t have the large beware signs around them.

And this isn’t saying it’s going to have every platform in the world not to try others, but to be frank most of the readers lie on these platforms, most of the opportunities. So for most people, you don’t have to look too far beyond this list. So I’ll put that link in the chat in just a moment when Amelia Sox says, I’ll mute myself so you don’t have to hear me typing to find it.

But the answer is. I’ll answer that in a roundabout way and include it in the [00:58:00] chat. The good places rather than the bad J. R. Mortimer says, will I be better to release at a time that suits us audiences versus UK audiences? They are in the UK. So we’re talking about like during morning, during afternoon, but obviously like morning in the U S is afternoon in the UK morning in the UK is middle of the night in the U S. How do you think you should think about that in the scope of having an international audience?

Emilia Rose: Yeah, I would say if most of your readers are U. S., you should base it around U. S., and that might be like, hey, I’m going to release a chapter every morning, U. S. time for my readers.

and UK gets it afternoon, like maybe they’re getting off of work or around that time. If you, there’s a lot of serial readers who are international. There’s a lot of them who are from Asia who read a lot of serials. So if you find the majority of your audience is like across the world maybe base it off of their times and something that you could do is just pull [00:59:00] your audience.

Hey, when do you want these? When do you want these serials to be released? When do you want a chapter every single week, every single month, day, whatever it is? Just so everyone You can see when people are mostly online.

Michael Evans: Amazing. And this will be our last question. But I think we actually covered an amazing amount of ground thanks to Amelia and thanks to you all.

And this question I actually really I think it’s great. It’s from Olivia. Which is, do writers ever serialize novels that have already been published? Is that something that you’ve done where you’ve written a novel first and then serialized it? Or do you know folks who’ve done that?

Emilia Rose: A lot of people have.

Yeah, I know there’s a lot of people who’ve done that for radish. Personally, I have never done it. And I would say if you’re planning on having a cereal and a book, you should start with a cereal. Because it’s easy to trans, like it’s [01:00:00] easy to bundle up a cereal and make it into a book, or it’s easier to do that rather than take a book and find.

Make smaller chapters and find where a good cliffhanger is, and you’ll have to do that for 50 chapters or more, or, it’s going to take a lot more work to bring it from a book to a serial. You can do it. But as we were talking about a little bit before, serial readers are not, tend to not look for those long descriptions, and books sometimes have those long descriptions, and there’s differences you have to be aware of when you’re bringing it from one format to the other or vice versa, so yeah, if you’re going to do both, I would recommend starting with a serial and then moving into a book, but you can start from either side.

Michael Evans: And as a follow up to that, in terms of the cadence of the posting, we talk a lot about, this will be my fast question, [01:01:00] but it ties into Renee’s question and to be honest, it’s a very good one that you asked, which is like, You might have, you convert an I’m saying convert that feels like weird, you’re getting ready to release a novel in that originally was a novel into the serial format.

We talk all the time about. Being consistent, but not overwhelming yourself. If you’re writing a serial actively publishing, like two, 2000 words, five times a week. So one episode of times a week might be a lot for some folks might not be a lot for others. It depends. Like we all have different cadences and different styles and that there’s nothing against that, but if you’ve already written the book.

That question of Oh, can I be consistent is a little bit different because you’ve already written it. So in that context. How often would you release it? Would you release like 20 chapters at once and then drip it out? Or would you still go in chapter one, chapter two? Like, how would you, how do you approach that?

Emilia Rose: Yeah, if you have it all written, let’s just say it’s a 50, 50 chapter book. And you have it all written, I would say release. [01:02:00] Like five to ten chapters at first to get people hooked into it, and then one at a time. I would not drop it all at once. There’s some instances where I would. Most of the time I would drop one chapter at a time

after that. Amazing.

Michael Evans: Yeah, no, great. And then I’ll answer from Casey one last question because it’s a really good one, which is is there anything like why is romance so popular in serials? Is there equivalent things to the genres? And what I’ll just say in general about the book market is that especially when it comes like in the e reading or especially e reading format is that romance just is the biggest genre.

Like across all mediums and formats. That is where the most gracious readers are. We’re reading the most books who are purchasing the most books and driving the most sales. And there’s different estimates, but it’s anywhere from cause we don’t have a ton of data on exactly what’s selling on Amazon and what volume is, [01:03:00] but anywhere from 40 to 60.

Percent of the genre fiction market is romance. It could be as high as 70%. I heard 70 percent today from someone this, which doesn’t like a non repayable source, this was coming from how they dissected Amazon sales data. Where you want. It’s definitely the biggest genre by a wide margin, but there are actually other genres that perform really well in serials, like a genre that performs really well in serials proportional to its overall kind of space in the overall market.

Would be something like progression, fantasy game lit, like those genres are really strong in, in, in the serial format and just being completely frank, like the place where those do best is Royal road. That’s just, that’s where a lot of these authors are. It’s where a lot of the readers are.

And I could go on about like different sub genres and different genres. There’s science fiction actually does, there’s a few popular audio serials for science fiction. And, it totally depends. There’s definitely some genres that underperformance cereals compared to the place in the overall market.

If I was to look at like a cozy mystery, love cozy mystery authors, a lot of cozy mystery authors who, are trying out cereals, I haven’t seen a ton of native success stories. Someone can prove me wrong, but I haven’t [01:04:00] seen a ton. Like anything, there’s always like unique things, the market.

But overall, like. Romance is just a very strong genre, but I wouldn’t let that cloud your judgment. If you’re not a romance writer, which many of you aren’t because the things that all writers do, although we have to figure out works for us, we can learn from each other. And frankly, a lot of times romance authors are a little bit ahead of the curve when it comes to marketing and how to build fandom.

And I think it’s good to take notes there. It’s like in rap or hip hop, and you in the music world, right? Like they’re always adopting the new thing and like at the edge of the business people like Jay Z starting his own record label, breaking away from the traditional.

Music industry at the time. I think if you look at the history of publishing, romance authors are similar. Although I will give credit to that’s like a generalization because I think literary PG authors specifically are unbelievably innovative and doing so many cool things and pushing the boundary.

And of course there’s pockets of authors everywhere doing amazing things. So it’s a generalization, a gross one, but I think that’s why you shouldn’t ignore anything coming out and just be like, okay, this is how it can work for me. Just because there’s like this [01:05:00] big market out there. There’s so many readers.

Like hundreds plus million that we can’t have all of them, but it’s about figuring out how can you learn about what other people have done to get their readers that can help you try and find more readers for yourself. With that said I think that’s a good message to end on. Amelia, thank you so much for this amazing chat today.

For folks who maybe popped in and out. This recording will be live very shortly. And if you did listen to this recording thank you for being here as always. Definitely check out our new serials for author’s site. We’re we don’t worry, like we’re doing more than just serials. We have more coming in the coming months, give us months, everyone.

But we, yeah, it’s not gonna happen overnight, but we wanted to start the serials kind of portal, what we’re calling and the next two portals that we’re doing are going to be foundations and discovery, which I’m really excited for. Both of those. But for cereals, I’m going to put the link in the chat.

This is just like a place where you could find everything. And this webinar will actually be like on that webpage very soon. It’s not there yet. Cause we’re still here, but just wanted to let you all know, [01:06:00] cerealsforauthors. com is like a nice little home. And by the way, that mailing list. You probably won’t get anything new there.

If y’all are on our mailing list already, like you don’t need to sign up again, you’re probably not gonna get anything new. If you want to be sent like another automation from us, like fine, but like you’re not going to get anything new. So maybe don’t do that. Totally up to you. Anyways, if you’re not on the mailing list, I guess you can definitely join.

But regardless, that’s my call to action. Don’t join our mailing list. Imagine that. With that said, I hope you have an amazing rest of your day, amazing weekend ahead, and as always, don’t forget storytellers rule the world. We’ll see y’all soon.

Emilia Rose: Thank you guys.

Michael Evans: Thank you.