Writing

I Serialized My Novel On Medium Before Publishing It

The results of my experiment

Mark Starlin
6 min readJun 28, 2020

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Mark Starlin

Serializing my novel on Medium before publishing it was an experiment. Since I planned to self-publish my novel, I didn’t see any downside to serializing it first on Medium. And I discovered several upsides.

The Strategy

Some writers post parts of their novels (or WIPs) on Medium sporadically, with weeks or even months going by between posts. Others publish once a week. Some on set days of the week.

Personally, if I go more than a couple of days without reading a story, I forget what is happening. So I decided to publish a new (three to seven-minute read) part daily. I figured three to five minutes was a good length for casual or impulse reading. I also thought it would be a good length for readers to try out part of the story to see if they like it.

Fortunately, I wrote my novel in short “scenes.” When posting on Medium, I often combined two scenes together when one was too short. This is where the seven-minute parts came from.

Benefits of Serialization

Here are some of the benefits I discovered by serializing my novel.

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