Autopsy of Kings

a detailed analysis of why I failed at serial fiction and what I learned in the process

tl;dr: I failed.

Thanks for coming…jk, jk, jk.

I mean, I did fail, but just kidding that I don’t have a few hundred words to say about it.

I made the decision to publish my novel KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD as a serial publication back in October. On April 20, the last two chapters will post on my Patreon.

To quote myself:

“You might also be wondering why I’m not going straight to publishing this book independently. The truth is that I want to revise a little, chapter by chapter, as I go...Plus, this feels like a really fun experiment for me as I continue to pursue traditional publication with other manuscripts.”

If I measured success as “I revised my manuscript and released every chapter online,” then I guess I could call it a success because I did revise and even rewrote significant portions of chapters, particularly Sophie’s POV chapters. (She was always the weaker character to me.)

Unfortunately, those were not the only goals I had for myself. I wanted to gain comfort and experience with promoting my work online for when I eventually have a completed book—whether traditionally or independently published—to promote. To quote myself again:

“I am trying to increase my comfort with promoting my work, please know that I am only at zero comfort now.”

That is where I failed.

Utterly and completely.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the various factors at play, so I’m going to share it list style. As always, I share because I know that I’m not alone or unique. If I’ve experienced these challenges, someone else has, too, and maybe we can feel less alone together. Some of what I’m sharing below might be controversial, and I am scared to share anything controversial, but…here goes anyway.

The five factors contributing to my failure: a list

1. The Election

I was so sure that things would be okay¹, that I was too idealist/naive to spend time considering how the timing of the election would impact my own ability to comfortably promote my work in online spaces. I didn’t think about how tone deaf I would feel posting “hey, please read my dystopian that I wrote as a way of coping with the 2016 election.” With my comfort level at self-promotion already at zero, I found it really challenging to rally the energy and desire to pop online and promote my work—especially dystopian work.

But, I did. I tried.

However, the big push to gain readers for the November 10 launch was swallowed up by own my despair.

If I could do it again…

I would give myself permission to pause in the aftermath of the election and delay the launch to February. Not that things were much better by then, but we would have collectively been into the “new normal” (yuck, I hate that phrase) instead of trying to get through the justified noise of the election and transition of power.

2. Patreon

This is nothing against Patreon, but it was a mistake for me given the circumstances. I chose Patreon for two reasons:

1. Patreon has a wider range of options for charging readers, and I liked the idea of being able to eventually charge for the entire “collection.”

2. No one² seems to have any negative feelings about Patreon as a platform.

This leads me to the platforms I rejected and why.

Two reasons why I did not choose Substack:

First: Substack’s options for collecting funds from readers are extremely limited. Patreon lets you sell single posts, gives you a much wider range of pricing options, and has one option that is particularly appealing to me that allows you to sell an entire collection. In practice, this means that I could theoretically sell the entire manuscript to readers for a set price equal to what they would pay for a similar novel as an ebook. I did not spend enough time researching ways I could work within Substack’s limitations (which are many) in order to come closer to that goal. Why not?

Second: Well, I stopped looking into Substack because I heard that I shouldn’t use Substack because it platforms some truly vile, evil, disgusting creators³ and that I shouldn’t contribute to bringing in revenue for Substack for this reason—which meant that if I committed to serial publication on Substack, it felt like facing the decision between never charging for my work or being guilty of funding Substack and therefore guilty myself of helping to platform these evil people. As recently as March 22, people are calling for creators to abandon Substack because its “creators are inadvertently fueling America’s failure.” More on that below.

Two reasons why I did not choose Wattpad:

First: In their documentation, they say that you should not start a story unless it is going to be at least 150,000 words. I knew that my story would not be that long. It was 96,000 going into this project and is now 106,000⁴.

Second: I browsed around, and it didn’t seem like KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD really fit in. Although there is a strong romantic subplot, KINGS is not a romance and the majority of the titles under "Teen Fiction” are. (Side note: I have been slowly drafting a longer piece on my disillusionment with young adult fiction that I hope to post in the next month or so.) Sure, an argument could be made, I guess, that KINGS might stand out in the crowd, but I tend to think that those top billing stories are such because that’s what the readership is looking for in that space.

Other platforms I looked into and rejected:

• Royal Road - I didn’t love the interface, and, like Wattpad, it seems like my contemporary dystopian thriller doesn’t quite fit in there.

• Kindle Vella - As I lamented before, Kindle Vella was originally part of my two-pronged plan right up until Amazon announced they were shuttering it.

• Archive of Our Own - It’s for fanfiction.

• Ream - This platform looks promising…but only if you write romance for adults.

• Radish - Same as above.

If I could do it again…

I would choose Substack. Here’s why:

First: I genuinely like the interface here on Substack. It’s certainly much, much better than Patreon for text-based art. (That “Poetry” feature would have come in really handy quite a few times when the indents mattered and would not stick with Patreon’s limited text editing.).

Second: I could figure out a way to collect an appropriate amount of money for the whole collection if I really wanted to, but at this point, I have no intention of charging for the story. If I had more readers and had succeeded in any other way, then maybe.

Third: I already have a readership here. I should have leaned into that rather than trying to build momentum from other platforms (Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and Substack) in order to redirect them to yet another space, Patreon.

Fourth, and here is where I worry I am about to get controversial…I actually cancelled publishing this so that I could come back and revise it again. Here’s the thing: due to predatory capitalism, there is no 100% purely good platform, and we (or at least I) need to be more flexible.

Choosing not to use Substack because of its association with platforming evil people only harmed my project and definitely didn’t do anything to harm Substack—especially because I am not charging any money.

It’s hard to navigate the world of social media and technopolies because our desire to do what’s right (i.e. boycotting specific platforms⁵) is often at direct odds with the outcomes we’re working towards: using our voice to reach an audience.

Decision-making when it comes to tech platforms kind of feels like driving a car. We all know the gas fumes are bad for the environment, but we still need to go places. Will I deliberately add one of those pollution-heavy extra mufflers (see gif above)? Or buy a gas guzzling behemoth? No. Will I eventually get an electric (non-Tesla) vehicle? Yes, when my current car stops working, and I can afford an electric vehicle. Otherwise, I have to accept that I am, in part, contributing to a larger problem because my options are constrained by factors outside of my control. This is not a moral failing on my part. It is a systemic failing that I am not currently in a position to avoid.

We can acknowledge the systemic failures while also not holding ourselves individually accountable for those failings—especially when we do not actually hold the power to enact change. I know the argument about power in numbers, and I agree, but I also believe that we can do anything but not everything.

This brings me back to the guilty-by-association dilemma when navigating social media platforms. For me, it means that I cannot judge others or myself for taking advantage of the free and affordable resources the techbros create—especially when there aren’t comparable alternatives.

Realistically, most of us do not have a whole lot of options. Sure, we can quit all the social media and pray for word of mouth for our books and creations—a cool idea in concept if you’re lucky enough to have enough people you know in real life⁶ who will spread the word, but…guess how they are probably going to spread the word beyond your immediate shared circles: social media!

It’s ubiquitous and, for now, largely inescapable. If you’re like me, you lack several critical things would give you the flexibility to pivot at the whiff of unscrupulous tech-bros acting poorly as tech-bros are wont to do:

• a traditional publishing deal including a hefty marketing budget

• an established readership

• a massive, personally-owned email list

• disposable income to purchase ads (which would be on social media most likely anyway)

One additional factor impacting me that may not be particularly salient to others is that I have no network of people I know in real life. Everything I do as a creative is behind a pen name to preserve my family’s privacy and to keep a strong separation between my worklife, which is fairly high profile and restrictive, and my creative life, where I try to enjoy freedom of expression.

Creatives, please don’t reproach yourselves for being at the mercy of the techbros. It’s okay to take advantage of the tools that are available–despite their leaderships’ unsavory or downright diabolical machinations. And, I mean take advantage in the truest sense of the phrase: use their products for personal gain. For me, this means that I have to come to terms with the fact that I might need to contribute to the Substack ecosystem because it is the most effective way to achieve my personal goals. At the end of the day, I hope to use my voice for good, even if that comes at the expense of using a product whose ethos I cannot support.

One last, salient, thing—The article I linked to above accusing creators of contributing to America’s failure recommends an alternate platform called ghost.org, the platform where the articile is published. Guess what ghost.org lacks? Any built-in mechanism for discoverability! They write:

In stage one, your focus should be on creating content where people already spend time.

This means creating samples of your work for the most appropriate social media channels (Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn), online communities (IndieHackers, Reddit), as well as sharing them with people you already know (email, Facebook, in-person).

The content needs to be free because the goal is discoverability [boldface in the original].

Fifth, Substack has something that Patreon does not—discoverability. Discoverability, as you’ll see later in this post, is something I desperately need for reasons.

3. Undiscoverable

A few things happened in the social media and self-promotion arena. Some were not in my control, some were, and some remain undetermined.

Not in my control:

Algorithms and filtering were chaotic in the weeks after the election. Instagram announced that they would stop using hashtags. Meta announced they would stop fact-checking, and yet we also have seen many stories of posts being suppressed. Unfortunately, I think I was swallowed up in that account suppression due to some keywords in the pitches and descriptions of my story.

Feel free to read the above to the Pink Floyd tune.

For the first few weeks, I felt like a silly (as opposed to dangerous) conspiracy theorist weirdo talking about what was happening with my account because I have always felt a little judgey myself when someone posts “please interact with this post— my account is being suppressed” or “does anyone know what to do if they are being shadowbanned?”

That kind of stuff always got a giant “oh please stop groveling for attention” eyeroll from me.

I had evidence and started collecting more. Visibility on my stories went down to 1% of my followers or less, which I have confirmed is much lower than average. I went from getting 300+ views on my posts and 120+ views on my stories to the low twenties and often the single digits.

For example, back on November 10, I shared a Reader’s Guide (which was the first time I used the pitch in the caption). That post got 902 views, but 902 is a higher than normal, likely because the post got a lot of initial traction. So, a few posts before that, I shared a post to promote this publication. That one had much less interaction, but still had 333 views. For contrast, a few days ago, I posted about the serial fiction and my post got 37 views.

A stark contrast. All of this led me to believe that I was—and am still—being suppressed on Instagram, which is my main social media account.

I fully acknowledge that the timing (as I mentioned in the first list item) was not ideal. There were a lot of pressing topics being shared in social media spaces, but not enough to account for the sudden drop in my visibility.

To answer the question you might be asking: no, I do not have any formal flags against my account. Whatever happened and continues to happen to my account is outside my purview and could be solely tied to the algorithm, but, as I’ll explain below, I don’t think so.

In my control:

The Pitches:

I should have thought about how I was going to promote KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD without setting off a bunch of content triggers. My original pitch was:

A young adult speculative thriller set in an alternate 2020 when two prep school juniors team up to stop their parents’ doomsday cult from ruining their lives.

Some problematic references there: 2020, doomsday, cult.

My second pitch was:

When Sophie and Mason discover their fathers’ plans to bring on doomsday, they must work together from inside a dangerous cult to stop the spread of a deadly virus before there’s no turning back.

Problematic references there: doomsday, cult, deadly virus.

No matter how I tried to describe this novel, I was red flagging everywhere, and I didn’t have any good alternative plans for pitching it, nor did I think about this potential risk before going live.

Eventually, I started using code words and false characters: pandemic becomes p@ndem!c and deadly becomes 💀-ly. I should have done that sooner.

My Mindset:

I let myself get defeated. There didn’t—and still doesn’t—seem to be anything I can do to increase the visibility on my social media short of starting a new account and going all in on short form video—although, even my short form videos tanked when I tried.

I refuse to give myself too hard of a time for not being able to adjust my mindset. I always knew it would be screaming into a void, but I didn’t realize that someone was also going to put a muzzle on me when I tried.

Remains undetermined:

Could I have started a new account and tried to promote the serial fiction there, applying my lessons learned? Maybe. But who knows if that would have worked? I grabbed the new handle and even spent some time learning and devising new strategies for connecting with readers through simple reels. I tested some of those strategies on my existing account with no change in the reach or visibility of my efforts.

If I could do it again…

• I would create more promo materials to share before I started publishing.

• I would force myself to be comfortable “repeating” myself. I still struggle resharing some of the same images despite the fact that I had all the evidence that only a tiny percent of my followers were seeing things!

• I would share for feedback and practice multiple kinds of pitches in a variety of styles, including far more unconventional approaches and maybe a few reels showing similar books to see if I could break out into readerspheres.

• I would experiment with paying for the blue checkmark for a month to see if it made a difference on my discoverability, visibility, and reach. But (see my above ethical dilemma with Substack) I have a really hard time forking over my time, attention, and money to Zuck. **UPDATE** I cannot pay for verification because I use a psuedonym and don’t have any forms of government ID to verify that it’s me.

It’s hard to say if any of those imagined efforts above would be advisable given the situation with my account. So, would I—rather, will I?—go ahead and start using the new account I created? I don’t know. It’s hard to think about because of how disheartening it was to watch my visibility plummet right when I needed it and having no recourse to repair the situation.

A few more thoughts on the discoverability piece, or, in my case, being undiscoverable:

I am beyond impressed with indie authors. It wasn’t until this experience that I fully grasped the magnitude of doing all of the work yourself, and I don’t even have a physical book or any of the trouble associated with that!

It also cast in glaring bright light the precarious situation we are in when we depend on a platform, in my case Instagram, that owes us nothing at all.

4. The Title

I changed the title about twelve chapters into the project. KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD had always been the title of this novel; however, I was worried that the title would give a false impression about colonization because of “new world,” and I was worried about how that would be perceived. So, I went with THINGS WE CAN’T UNSEE instead. The trouble with that title is that it doesn’t really capture the energy of the story and that phrase “things we can’t unsee” never actually appears in the novel, whereas “kings of the new world” and references to the bad guys trying to make themselves kings comes up a lot. Plus, the overarching theme of the novel from the perspective of the villains is that they are a bunch of rich, white, elitist, cultists who are trying to destabilize the United States in order to make themselves kings. Sound familiar?

If I could do it again…

I would be more confident in my original choice and stick with KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD from the beginning. It was so annoying to go back and try to fix it everywhere. I am proud of myself for being okay with changing after I had gone live. People don’t generally describe me as “go with the flow,” but I channeled a laissez faire attitude from somewhere and did it. (I was encouraged by a friend whose opinion I hold in the highest regard and by the fact that no one was really seing what I was doing anyway.)

5. Personal Life

Friends, my life is really hard. I work a stressful job overseeing major high-profile projects in an environment that is high stakes and high pressure. My husband’s recovery continues to go well, but it is taxing in so many small ways—which add up fast. My middle child has been in an ongoing but improving crisis since late November, and we recently confirmed that they are on the autism spectrum—adjustments needed all around!

I truly needed to let anything extraneous go over the last few months.

You know what’s entirely extraneous? Worrying about how algorithms are messing up my visibility. So, there’s that.

It’s easy for me now to reflect upon this experience and pull apart the various ways I could have tried to troubleshoot the visibility issue—or even how I could have pivoted faster to Substack to take advantage of the built-in discoverability tool here, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to pause and reflect. I had just enough to commit to my publication schedule and make it happen—in part because the revising was an escape and an opportunity for me to reach a flow state, which are the reasons why I write.

If I could do it again…

I wouldn’t change much. I dropped everything and focused on my kid. That will always be my choice.

Overall

I failed in my experiment. However, even if I had done all of the things I noted above, I’m not sure how much I could have moved the needle. In case you’re curious, I have 13 people in my Patreon as members. I required free membership for readers after chapter four to help me better track insights. Four are people who have read some or all of the chapters.

I am really torn about having failed with self-promotion. I am the kind of person who “does whatever it takes” to accomplish something. When I was a kid in school, if there was an extra credit opportunity, I earned that extra credit—even when I already had a 100% in a class. After writing all of this out, and reflecting on it over the last week, I think there were some things I could have done differently, but I’m not so sure I failed as much as I was the victim of a confluence of unfortunate circumstances outside of my control. I’m also not an idiot who’s going to waste time and energy on something futile.

I learned some valuable insights about myself though.

The first, and most ironic, is that I don’t enjoy reading serial fiction. How was I ever going to market something that I wouldn’t choose to engage with? I can’t claim that choosing serial publication was a mistake, though, because this was the only way I felt comfortable sharing the story without going straight to self-publishing. I have a lot of reservations about self-publishing to begin with, moreso when I am thinking about self-pub for my two young adult books, KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD and the horror-romance I’m currently querying⁷. This process has made me even more wary of self-publishing on the distribution and discoverability fronts specifically. Everything I write is going to have problematic words in the pitches, descriptions, quotes, etc., and none of us can pretend to know what is and isn’t going to fall out of favor with the algorithm.

The second is that I need to build in a lot of time for creating any promotional or promotional-adjacent materials before launching any project. This needs to be part of my overall calendar; otherwise, life will happen and squeezing those extra tasks in may not. If I’d had an arsenal of promo content at the ready, I might not have struggled quite so much with maintaining a posting schedule—even during the most challenging times with my kid.

The third is that I am woefully apologetic about taking up space and talking about myself or my achievements. The threshold for overdoing it on social media seems really forgiving, especially because most of your followers never see everything you post.

What are my next steps?

Well, the truth is that I don’t have to stop trying to promote KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD after I publish the last chapter on April 20. In fact, I might have an easier time promoting it as a finished book. The one lingering issue is that account suppression piece. I’m really at a loss there, and it may be that the most logical thing is to start that fresh account. Comment below if you have any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions for me!

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Entertaining Distractions

I am still watching Outer Banks while I exercise, but I am fast approaching the end of episodes and have no idea what I’ll pick up in its place. Clearly, I need something with murder, boat chases, treasure, love triangles, murder, bad guys, murder…Comment below with any suggestions please!

I also binged a show that I thought would be so dumb, and it was! But also, I loved it: Resident Alien, I believe it’s from SyFy but I watched it on Netflix. I highly recommend it for silly humor, escapism, aliens, and sneaky moments of tender-heartedness.

The Residence was a great show that perfectly captures “cozy murder.” Until I watched it, I was unsure how cozy + murder could be a thing. I get it now. Also, top-notch bird content.

I just started Locke & Key and have some high hopes.

As far as reading goes, I’m in a fiction slump. So far this year, I’ve read The Screaming Staircase (audio) by Jonathan Stroud while on a weekend trip with my middle child. There were two long carrides and this was a great way to pass the time together. In an effort to further expand my horizons into adult fantasy, I read The Summer Tree (audio) by Guy Gavriel Kay, and I loved it enough to start the second one right away.

Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the first five nonfiction books that I read, but the one I finished this morning is AMAZING: Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders. I have the eBook from Bookshop.org⁸ and the audio, and yesterday the physical copy arrived from Bookshop.org because this is the kind of book I need to flip open randomly for comfort and inspiration. The general concept is a series of essays about writing grouped by themes and centered around the premise that writing is powerful in times of turmoil. It is exactly what I needed, and I am forever grateful to the person who recommended it and to Charlie Jane Anders for writing it.

I must also share that we brought two puppies in our lives in Febraury. They are adorable, hilarious, and exhausting.

Words of Wisdom

I started watching a YouTube series by a professor out of the University of Toronto named John Vervaeke called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. It is approximately 50 hours of content, and I am three hours in. Episode Two is about flow, and in it Vervaeke says:

“The more often you get into the flow state, the more likely you will rate your life as meaningful. The more you will experience well being.”

My well has been bone dry for months now, and refilling the well has felt like an impossible indulgence. I know my word for 2025 is nourish, but I have been unable to prioritize myself—or rather, prioritizing my kids is how I prioritize my heart. They are my whole heart—it’s cut in three pieces, one for each of them. But I am slowly feeling like I can begin pouring a little bit of myself into a new creative endeavor. I want to experience flow; I know exactly how to experience flow; it’s time that I do.

Until next time,

1. In retrospect, I must have had an inkling that things were going to go badly because I remember the complete dread I felt beginning the weekend before the election. But I also did not want to stew in worry about the election. How could it possibly end with the convicted felon being re-elected??

2. I guess “no one” is “anyone” or “everyone”… the collective “people” to my knowledge have nothing against Patreon.

3. N@zis and homophobes and horrible hate mongerers like that. To my knowledge, this is true. I personally haven’t encountered content like that, and I refuse to search for it to verify independently.

4. Do I want (okay, need) to write the sequel to KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD? Yes. 100% yes. That story is trapped in my head, and it needs to be exorcised.

5. I discussed this with my 16yo, who succinctly said: “You can’t boycott a platform because people are using the platform.”

6. I have no network of people I know in real life on purpose. Everything I do as a creative is behind a pen name to preserve my family’s privacy and to keep a strong separation between my worklife, which is fairly high profile and restrictive, and my creative life, where I try to enjoy freedom of expression.

7. Please send positive thoughts out into the universe on this one for me. I’m losing steam and hope.

8. Purchasing and reading ebooks through Bookshop.org’s new ebook platform is easy and just as seamless as Kindle. I am happy to be able to abandon Amazon.