A More Elegant Solution for Fiction

Substack + Laterpress = a reading experience that will engage readers and keep them hooked, page-to-page and chapter-to-chapter.

You’re about to discover a lovely solution for sharing long-form fiction to your Substack readers, but it would be even better if a similar solution were offered by Substack, itself. If this becomes popular, you can be sure they’ll make implementation a priority. Also, what you’re about to see costs you nothing. The only company taking a cut is Stripe. If you feel bad for Substack, pay the $50 for a custom domain. It rewards Substack for what they’ve provided and created a more seamless experience between your Substack and your book engine.

Plus, with this not costing you anything, you can give the book away if you choose. I’m offering free weekly chapters of The Last Temptation of Winnie-the-Pooh. In the meantime, I’ll be offering chapters of Kraken in a Coffee Cup to subscribers only. When Pooh finishes, I’ll start making Kraken chapters free until… I don’t. The plan is always to have free and subscriber-only content going, but exactly how that will work is malleable. Laterpress allows for that freedom… to a degree. You can make the first chapters free one a time. After ten chapters, though, your options are limited to groups of five.

Unless you use and benefit from Laterpress’s traffic-driving systems, they take no cut of your sales. Stripe does, of course. (I have those systems turned off.)

You can sell books individually or offer a subscription to individual books or to a collection of books. I’ve used the collection approach, and I’ll charge a subscription that’s tiny by Substack standards for access to my serialized fiction. My articles on Substack will remain free. The separation between the two is a drawback of this hybrid approach, but you can make it work.

You can check out it out for yourself now, if you’re the kind of person who likes to get a feel for something before trying to discuss it. It’s a good approach. You’ll have a context for everything and come equipped with questions you need answered.

You can see here that I’ve set up The Deeper Stories Library. If had other collections or other stand-alone books, they’d be listed here as well. When you first log in and arrive, it will be an intimidating white space. Everything is minimalistic. For guidance, I searched “laterpress” plus topics and that pulled up various blog entries they’ve written. There’s no direct access to that from the control panel, but you can find them on their site.

As I edit, this, my site just went live today. The Reports section is very simple: Reader. Chapters. Total Revenue. I’ve had 4 readers. They’ve read 2 chapters, and I’ve gained 1 paid subscriber.

What constitutes a reader? I have no idea. I’ve had more than 4 people click over, but maybe only 4 actually opened a chapter?

The Profile tab allows for some basic information, a picture, a website link, and a social media link.

This is what you get on the Settings screen. The most relevant section is setting up Stripe. You can also enable Community Features which include a referral program and contests. I am a Dark Mode reader, but I set my default for light because it matches my site better. Readers can choose the mode they prefer.

One of the most important (to me) features in the custom domain, but that’s not done here. That comes into play when you’re setting up a book or collection.

You’ll need to decide upfront if a book will be part of a collection because you can’t change that after the fact. You will also assign the book (or collection) a subdomain and that also can’t be changed. The only option would be to delete the book and start again, which is what I did. If you’re offering stand alone books, you can set up a custom subdomain for each book. (You can also just keep the Laterpress root.) Of course, if you wanted, you could buy a custom domain for each book and just use the www subdomain, but with multiple books that gets pricey. For the collection, you assign a subdomain for the collection. An individual book becomes a path at the end of the url. Example: sub.domain.com/book/title … where “title” is the name you give to succinctly represent that particular book.

At the main control panel, I set up a collection. When opened, you get more intimidating white space, but you can see here two of the books I’ve added. You can change the order of books, which will be important when you want the books you’re currently marketing to be visible without a new visitor having to hunt.

When you click on “Add Book,” you’re provided with a screen where you choose to make a the book a standalone, add it to a new collection, or add it to an existing collection. If you choose an existing collection, you choose which one from a drop down menu. I’ve only created the one, so that’s what I chose.

If you aren’t working from a collection, you don’t see this page, but you’re still given the options added to the following section. Here you’ll upload you cover, assign the title and the url path (which cannot be changed. You choose a genre which become important if you select community features. If you have an ISBN, you can include it here, but you don’t need one. You can also add a short description.

That brings us back to the screen with the books you saw earlier. You add the actual content through the edit buttons, but first, let’s look at the Details tab. This lets you return to the information you entered when setting up the collection. You’ll have something similar when you look at the page for each book. What you cannot see here is at the bottom of this page is where you set up the custom domain.

From the books tab, if I select one of the books to edit, I’m brought to this page. Again, I’ve added chapters already, but when you open it for the first time you’ll get empty white space. You can import an epub or add one chapter at a time.

Adding a chapter just entails entering the chapter title and copy-and-pasting the text. There is a custom chapter numbering to avoid using the title. I don’t normally do chapter titles, but for serialized chapters, maybe it’s for the best. I uploaded The Age of Innocence by Edith Warton, and used custom chapter numbering. (The cover page placed my byline under the title, and there’s no way to avoid that, which is unfortunate.)

This is the chapter screen. The menu at the top left lets you adjust the font and brightness (readers have the same capacity). Clicking on the the clock gives you access to earlier versions of the chapter. The last symbol enters a full-screen mode. Other than that, you can publish, unpublish, or delete.

When you send a reader to your collection page, this is what it looks like. You have the banner, a title, a description, and the books. There are two menus. I won’t show them yet, because here, they’re functionality is limited. When you are in the actual book, the reader get more control.

Scroll down to see the books in the collection.

I went ahead and added four covers to demonstrate the look and feel of a collection. You can schedule an email to announce a published chapter but you cannot yet schedule a publishing date, but that is in their future plans.

When the reader selects a book, they’re brought to a title page with the cover and description. Click “Read Now” and the reader is brought to wherever they left off in the book.

Click on the icon to the left and a menu opens allowing the reader to adjust their reading experience, including size of font, font type, line spacing, and brightness.

Click on the bars to the right to open the main menu. Most of the options are self explanatory, but bookshelf lets you pick from the standalone books and collections you’re reading. In this case, only the one collection would show up unless you’re reading books from other writers on Laterpress.

There are options for scrolling through pages whether on the phone or the desktop, giving readers what they’re used to in screen-based reading. You can also offer epubs for download, free or paid. All of that’s fantastic considering it’s at no cost to the author. None of it at any point costs us anything.

Are their drawbacks to Laterpress? Yes, it’s not perfect. You have very little control. There’s no option to add a link to the reader back to the main site unless they make the effort to open the menu, click on about the author, and then click on the website link. This problem is exacerbated with Substack because there’s no mechanism for forcing a link to open in a new tab. That’s an inconvenience, but driving our readers to our books is the intent, so I can live with it.

EDIT: I have a link in my top menu that opens in the same tab. However, I’ve realized that ALL OTHER EXTERIOR LINKS open to a new tab.

Some good news, when you use the device's back button, it doesn't drag you through all the pages, chapters, and books you've read. It takes you to the cover page and then the collection screen. You'll be back to the main site in 3 clicks. It doesn't matter how many books you've viewed. It's still just 3 clicks of the back button to get home.

When the reader finishes the book, one final click will bring them to a Discover More page. If you’ve opted in to community features, it will offer books from other writers, and if a reader clicks through, it works like your standard referral program. Note: You/they get the referral for the life of a subscription, not just the one time. If you don’t opt-in, the Discover More page still opens up, only it’s blank.

Also, there’s no option for additional artwork beyond the cover, and you'll have to do the set-up somewhere other than your phone. The reading experience is wonderful on the phone, and working on the chapters seems fine (for the first couple of books in your list.) You just can't do the backstage work there.

Getting back to the positives, your readers are not hit with a subscription page or log-in when they first arrive. That never happens, actually, unless you’ve turned on the payment feature and they hit the paywall. At that point, they’re offered the opportunity to subscribe. They’ll also have a button they can press to unlock subscriber-only books and chapters.

Most important of all, the very reason why we’re here, the reading process page-to-page and chapter-to-chapter is smooth and intuitive.

Take a moment to explore the Library for yourself. Open “The Last Temptation.” Even though chapter two just released yesterday, I'm releasing chapter three today as a bonus. See how you like the experience and whether this would be something that would work for you. If you like the story, come back. I’ll be adding chapters weekly.

Thank you,

Thaddeus Thomas