The Novel Is Dead. Long Live the Novel.
How independent authors are reinventing long-form fiction—and why you should too.
I was recently a guest on the Scifi4Me podcast, and we got into a conversation about something I see constantly among indie authors: we left traditional publishing, but traditional publishing hasn’t left us.
What I mean by that is so many independent authors are still asking for permission.
“Is it okay if I…” is a common sentence when I first talk to my editing clients. What do you mean, “is it okay?”
The sense of disempowerment is endemic, which is the opposite of what independence is meant to bring. You don’t need to beg Amazon’s algorithm for permission to be discovered or go down a checklist of genre conventions to tell the story you actually want to tell. You certainly don’t need to ask the ghost of some literary agent who rejected you years ago for permission to believe your work has value.
We internalized rules that were never ours.
Being independent means you get to decide not just what you write, but how you deliver it. The 80,000-word ebook formatted for Kindle is one option. It’s not the only option. It’s not even necessarily the best option for your story or your audience.
So instead of lecturing you about breaking free from invisible chains and reviving your inner teenager, I want to do something more useful: show you what’s actually working in the not-quite-a-novel arena. What does it look like for real authors who are readers in ways the traditional publishing industry never imagined—and never would have permitted?
The Rise of the Web Serial
I’ve talked about serials before, as well as writing traditional novels… but shorter. If there’s one thing indies can all agree on, it’s that filler content needs to die.
The Slim Novel: Trad Pub is Learning from Indie Authors
Traditional publishers never want to admit what we all know: their business model is outdated and dying. They only get by on giving fat deals to big names and relying on the prestige of their imprints. Part of that prestige, weirdly, has always included the physical heft of their books.
The elephant in the room is Royal Road.
If you write fantasy, science fiction, or especially LitRPG, you already know this platform. If you don’t, here’s the short version: Royal Road is a free platform where authors post chapters of ongoing stories, often daily or several times per week. Readers follow along, comment on each chapter, and watch the story unfold in real-time.
I talk a lot about making profit from your writing, but many authors just want a following, a community. And Royal Road is the place to be if that’s what you want.
The numbers are staggering. Top stories on Royal Road accumulate millions of views. Authors build followings of tens of thousands of dedicated readers (readers who later buy their books on Amazon, fund their Patreon accounts, and line up for audiobook releases).
What’s interesting is that LitRPG as a genre was basically created by this ecosystem. Video game fans and RPG players who weren’t interested in buying books did want stories with stat sheets, level-ups, and progression systems. No publisher was going to take that chance. So they wrote it themselves, posted it for free, built an audience, and created one of the fastest-growing fiction genres of the decade.
The format shaped the content. The content built the audience. The audience created a market.
I’ve often said I don’t understand LitRPG. At all. But I don’t need to. It’s not written for me, and the people who it is written for number in the millions.
Horror in Your Mailbox
David Viergutz took a completely different approach with Scaremail.
He started off as a novelist and made money doing it… but not enough. He was just another author producing just another novel. The quality was there, but that wasn’t enough to make him stand out. So he changed the format of his stories. Now they arrive in your actual, physical mailbox—one chapter at a time, sealed in wax-sealed envelopes that look like they crawled out of a Victorian nightmare.
In an age of infinite digital content, he’s betting that readers will pay more for something scarce, tangible, and ritualistic. Each envelope becomes an event. Opening it becomes part of the experience. The anticipation between deliveries becomes part of the horror.
Physical products are hard, and when I heard him speak at Author Nation, he noted his path was difficult and probably not for most people. But that’s not the point. The point is that Viergutz found an audience willing to pay premium prices for an experience no ebook could replicate.
What’s your story’s equivalent? What format would make your fiction unforgettable?
Audio-First (or Audio-Only) Readers
Welcome to Night Vale launched in 2012 as a free fiction podcast presented as a community radio show from a strange desert town where every conspiracy theory is true. They didn’t need a book deal or a publisher. Just two creators with a microphone and a weird idea.
Today, the podcast has been running for over twelve years. It spawned multiple novels that debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. It launched a live show that tours internationally. It created Night Vale Presents, a production company that now produces dozens of other fiction podcasts.
Audio drama isn’t a lesser format than prose. For certain stories—particularly horror, mystery, and anything that benefits from atmosphere—it might be better. The constraints of the medium (no visual description, only dialogue and sound) force tighter writing. The delivery method (earbuds, alone, often at night) creates intimacy prose can’t match.
The Magnus Archives, Limetown, Alice Isn’t Dead, The Bright Sessions—the fiction podcast space has exploded with creators finding audiences traditional publishing would never have reached.
You can do it via podcasts, YouTube, and direct, thanks to companies like Bookfunnel.
Vertical Video and the Only Fans Model
Here’s one you probably haven’t considered, and I never would have if not for a client who found me on YouTube.
I once had a repeat client who had me ghostwrite a connected short story collection. She was an OnlyFans creator and she read the stories aloud on vertical video—fully clothed—for her paying subscribers.
Let’s set aside any assumptions about that platform for a moment and think about what was actually happening: a creator with an existing audience wanted content that would differentiate her from competitors. She had a delivery mechanism her audience already used. She had a payment system already in place. All she needed was the right content.
The stories were erotic, but nowhere near as explicit as something like Haunting Adeline. Certainly not the debauchery of the monster-fucker books. They were atmospheric, moody pieces that worked perfectly as intimate readings delivered directly to a phone screen. The format—short, vertical, spoken aloud—shaped how I wrote them. The platform shaped who read them. The result was fiction that found an audience it never would have reached through traditional channels.
The Epistolary Renaissance
Remember Dracula? If you’ve only seen the movie adaptation, maybe you don’t know it’s not written as a novel. It’s written as a collection of letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, and ship’s logs. The “found document” format made the horror feel real.
Matt Kirkland realized something clever: Dracula is structured by date. Each entry happens on a specific day. So he created Dracula Daily—a Substack that emails you each entry on the day it’s dated, letting you read Dracula in real-time over the course of the story’s timeline. (Because Bram Stoker’s Dracula is now in the public domain)
It went viral. Thousands of readers experienced a century-old novel as if it were happening right now, their inboxes delivering each horror in its proper sequence. The format enhanced the story, making it feel more real.
And of course you know I serialized my own novel on Substack, and now I’ve created a digital magazine where the reader can choose to have their chapter delivered weekly, or can buy the whole issue at the end of the month.
Projects like this demonstrate that modern fiction could use the same trick. Email, text messages, social media posts, voicemails—any “found document” format your reader already knows how to process.
The Point Isn’t the Format
I’m not telling you to abandon Amazon, start a podcast, or mail handwritten chapters to your readers.
I’m telling you that the format is a choice. Every story has a delivery mechanism that serves it best. Sometimes that’s a paperback. Sometimes it’s an audiobook. Sometimes it’s something no one has tried yet.
The technology exists. The payment infrastructure exists. The audience appetite for new experiences absolutely exists.
What you bring to the table is the story—and the creativity to imagine how it could reach readers in ways they’ve never experienced before.
The Twitter Crush: Written for YOU
The Twitter Crush is my upcoming novel told entirely through text messages, emails, and social media posts. I first released it serially on Substack, and on January 20th, it will be available for purchase in ebook, paperback, hardback, and audio.
The ebook is available for pre-order now.
Whether you read it for the story or to study the format, I hope it sparks some ideas for your own work.
