ARC Worlds State of the Union

A new format for Friday fiction

Sites like Royal Road and Wattpad prove there is a demand for serial fiction, but what happens when you’re waist deep into a series? What’s the pitch to a new reader to start reading the first of a hundred chapters when it’s much easier to turn to something you already know and love?

I started this Substack as a way to find new readers and to make it easier for people to try my stories, and also as a way to hold myself accountable as I wrote my second book.

With respect to the latter, I succeeded. Guild of Magic is done, having been serialized here since November 2021. And I’ll start serializing book 3 (whose title is a secret unless you are a paid subscriber) next Friday.

With respect to the former, the jury is still out. We are now 80+ free chapters deep into the NYC Questing Guild, and so if you are just arriving here from elsewhere, that’s 10 hours of reading to get caught up. And as I’ve focused more on getting out my new chapters, and less on other content here over the past six months, I suspect it became very easy to ignore the weekly “Guild of Magic Chapter Three Zillion” emails you’ve been receiving.

So I’m going to try something a bit different, modeled after one of the most successful Substack newsletters I’ve seen in terms of balancing serial content, interesting behind-the-scenes stuff, and reader engagement.

If you haven’t heard of

Brian K. Vaughan

, he is the writer and co-creator of Saga, Paper Girls, Y: The Last Man, and much more, and on his Substack,

Exploding Giraffe

, he is serializing 1-2 pages a week of his new graphic (and NSFW) novel, Spectators, drawn by the amazing

Niko Henrichon

.

Rather than posting new pages and then separately posting cool behind-the-scenes content later in the week, everything is nicely packaged in one Monday afternoon newsletter, with a random Question of the Week that gets hundreds of responses every time. Now, part of that is because there is usually a giveaway of something cool for one random commenter, but the questions are usually fun and offbeat, so I think people enjoy answering them for their own sake.

Now you may be asking yourself, “how is de-emphasizing your books going to help convince people to read them?” and it’s a good question.

I think the best email newsletters are something that hit your inbox regularly and that are so compelling that you anticipate their arrival. I’d like to think that the stories I write are compelling in their own right, but again, from an external perspective, it’s like trying to catch up on 100 seasons of a soap opera. And I miss writing my links of the months posts, so this also gives me the opportunity to share that with you.

I hope this Friday email becomes something you look forward to each week and thanks again for being an ARC Worlds subscriber!

Fun things!

• If you haven’t watched a Pitch Meeting, you are missing out on one of the funniest movie Youtube channels! This week, it’s Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3, which I saw last week (and no, I’m still not crying).

• And, if you saw the movie and really wished you could be BFFs with the cast, then you are definitely going to want to read this profile on how the cast saved James Gunn’s career after he was fired by Disney in 2018. Or maybe you will feel bad for Bradley Cooper that he missed out on this incredible friendship because he wasn’t on set for the movies.

• Adventures in arbitrage:

Guild of Magic, Chapter 39!

We’ve reached the end of the second arc and boy is it a doozy! Read it below. But before you do, please add Guild of Magic to your Goodreads Want to Read shelf here!

Comics!

If you’re a comic reader, head to my weekly comics release post below. Some very emotional Spider-Man happenings, intense X-Men psychic battles, and Daredevil reaching the absolute depths are in store for you.

Open thread: what are you reading now?

Question of the week!

If you could choose a book (or comic) to be made into a TV show or movie, what would it be? Bonus question: who would you cast as the main character?

Answer by leaving a comment for a chance to win a copy of David Pepose and Ruben Rojas’ The O.Z. #1, which takes Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz’s granddaughter back to that titular realm, only to find it a war zone.