Publishing Fiction to Substack: An Interview with Urna Semper

Introduction

It was Author Takeover Day for the release of Moonlight and Margaritas, and I was absolutely drenched in flop sweat. I had a script for the entire half hour of my slot, planned out minute by minute. Each of my posts, graphics, and videos were prepared and ready to go. I’d made a quiz, a special romance button giveaway over on Fourthwall, and two videos for the purpose. As is typical for me when doing something technical, complicated, and new, I ate nothing and drank only coffee, staring with laser focus at my computer, watching each author post during their slot. I engaged with everything, liked every post. When it was all over, I remember having to take a shower, scrubbing off the smell of baby-author terror. I’ve spoken at academic conferences, taught college courses, even defended a dissertation! But this mattered to me in a different way, and it scared the crap out of me. This was part of my bridge out of strict, boring stay-at-home motherhood and constant thinking about baby paraphernalia, having nothing to talk about but parenting books and recipes and babyhood milestones. More extremely, this was part of my bridge from academia (finally) and into being a different sort of writer and thinker.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to be any good at it.  

I don’t remember a lot of the material from that day, but I do remember everything posted by Urna Semper. In the midst of my terror, her posts intrigued me enough to shake me out of it some. Beautiful maps of her world, Iphigenia… lovely Italian-inspired art and frescoes.

And mentions of posting fiction—fiction?—to Substack.

“Do you post chapters to Substack?” I recall asking, confused and trying to get my head around this. I go to Substack for arcane tech news. My partner follows a Substack about the slow, arduous demechanization of the Russian Army.

“I post whole novels to Substack!” Urna replied. As you might imagine, this only intrigued me more. It stuck in my brain, rattling around. Like Urna, I write a lot. A lot. I’ve wondered a great deal about where and how best to serialize some of that material, and where I might find the readers who would enjoy it.

Eventually it occurred to me… maybe I should just ask. Urna Semper was nice enough to agree to this week’s interview, and I hope her words can be as helpful to you as they were to me.

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Substack and Controversy

Substack has very recently found itself mired in controversy regarding an error in push notifications—and if it didn’t involve Nazis and a swastika, that “whoopsie” might have been a fun throwback to my Dreame article. But it’s not a whoopsie and it’s not fun; it highlights the sort of material that’s been allowed to fester on the site, which endangers not only Substack, its creators, the journalists who rely on the platform, and their credibility, but also endangers our society and the vulnerable people within it. This is an issue facing more platforms than just Substack, of course, and the journalists and authors who have built their platforms there face an unenviable choice. They can attempt the great migration, hoping their audiences come with them (and some authors have not only managed it, but seen success), or they can stay put, give the platform grace it may or may not deserve, and hope Substack gets their act together. I don’t know Substack well enough as a platform to know the best course, or to predict what might happen next. That decision also looks very different from the vantage point of different authors and creators. Today’s generous interviewee remains, for the moment, on Substack, but I believe Urna Semper’s knowledge of the platform and words of wisdom can be helpful to many authors trying to decide if they want to use Substack or a similar platform.

In an article last year, Jane Friedman cautioned authors against mistaking the use of Substack as a good replacement for curating an email newsletter. I believe that, regardless of where you post chapters or epubs, keeping an excellent email list and lead magnet delivery, both of which you can easily migrate, are the gold standard. If you do post chapters somewhere—Substack, Wattpad, a website, etc.—consider a hybrid format and collect those links into a newsletter, to tell your wider email list. The sense I got from Urna Semper in our interview was of a writer using Substack to get words on the page and in front of readers, each and every day—essentially as an accountability tool. This regularity has led to a large corpus of material which the author can and has turned into novels in epub format for publication, and that works immensely well for their writing process. As Urna noted, the readers on Substack are functioning as beta/ARC readers, in addition to keeping the author accountable. With a few small exceptions, regardless of whether you’re thinking of posting fiction to Substack or one of its alternatives—Ghost or Buttondown, for instance—Urna’s experience can be of value to your decision making.

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About Urna Semper

Urna is a mysterious figure, and has been so for me since I joined the author group for Moonlight and Margaritas, printed by Tender and Tempting Tales. The idea around here is that we all do a little bit in terms of marketing, and that will help become the tide that lifts all boats. Since I’ve come onboard the Tender and Tempting Tales team as Social Media Manager, it’s been my job to know enough about the various authors and their output to be enthusiastic about them and make stuff like our media kit. Most of the authors and their subgenres are easy enough to get my head around. Aubree Valentine writes about sexy cowboys, Annie McEwan writes zesty historical romance, and Luci Beach adores lists and a bright, chick-lit sort of vibe.

Then there was Urna. One of the reasons I wanted to do this interview was to know more myself about all the interesting and seemingly intricate and arcane things Urna was doing on social media and Substack. I tend to call Urna my “fellow anthology weirdo,” but if we’re doing comparisons, I’m junior varsity weird next to her. Urna’s is a unique genre of one, a blend of space fantasy, historical romance, and investigatory cyberpunk, with some erotica on the side; in that way, it might be said that what Urna produces, indeed what she may be herself, is a very intricate and very long work of art.

Beyond that, as with all artists, I think it’s best that the author and the art speak for themselves. Because Urna is a pen, and because this interview is about experience on a platform to help give other authors information, this interview is not about the politics of Substack or any other platform; there are already a wealth of well-informed articles out there about this, and information about serializing to Substack can still be applied, as I have noted, to many of its alternatives or similar platforms. You can find Urna Semper on social media, of course, as well as in a wealth of anthologies, and currently on her Substack at: https://urnasemper.substack.com. 

My advice, if you dislike Substack especially, is to consider just picking up one of Urna Semper’s books the old-fashioned way. The only reason authors have to engage with this constantly cycling hellscape of platforms is because so much content out there is offered for free, and authors’ output finds itself in contention with a great deal of other entertainment. Here’s an anthology in which she’s featured: Amazon.com: Goblin Souk (Raconteur Press Anthologies Book 55) eBook : Sanderson, Cedar, Wheeler, Stanley, Stone, Dean, Begley, Ted, Semper, Urna, Markman, Christopher, Anderson, Xavier, Hathaway, Ross W, Sanders Jr, J Benjamin, Wilder, Stephen: Kindle Store

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Interview

Q: Thank you so much for joining us. First off, would you mind telling the readers a little bit about what you write? Your genres, current series, and especially what you feature on Substack?

A: It’s hard to classify my writing exactly. It reads like historical fiction, except after a few paragraphs you stop and say, “What was that bit about cloning? Wait, there’s a spaceport?” 

It’s set in the 32nd century on another planet, but the SF elements are only what got them there—the stories themselves are more universal, and most common people live lives more in an 18th-19th-century level of technology. 

The romance aspect is about people who fall in love in difficult social conditions, that we might imagine that we have left centuries behind us, and the themes are about power, politics, religion, and the ultimate failure of human societies… but also people who kiss and get in bed, the same as now.

I have three serials going on simultaneously. 

One is a mystery featuring Dardana Fenek, a private investigator and runaway clone; it follows up my first novel about her, which I am halfway through editing. 

In the first one (The Pearl Crucible) she helps a militia officer solve a murder in the planet’s capital city, and manages to enter a socially protective romantic relationship with him and maintain her current romantic relationship with her maid Barsina. In the second, current novel,  (The Thessaly Affair)  she discovers that his family has arranged a marriage for him with a wealthy young woman named Thessaly Ĉen… She and this fiancee must come to terms while trying to find him. He has mysteriously vanished, and his protection has gone as well!

The next serial (Fallen From Stars) is a story about a visitor to Dardana’s world, Hee-young, who comes from another colony on a trade mission after being out of contact for centuries. She is unprepared for their society, and her mind has been disrupted by a piece of technology she has brought. She is trying to survive with the assistance of one of the crewmen who took her off her ship, as well as a cloned woman from the planet’s space station, all while discovering what her feelings for them are and keeping her sanity.

The third serial (Krisa and the Valley of Gold) is a sequel to my second book; the daughter of the lead character—newborn at the end of the first—is now 26, and is protective of her family and (justifiably) suspicious of the outside world. Forces that cost her mother her freedom are now gathering outside their happy valley once again.

I feature all of these on Substack, a bit at a time, and also short stories set in and around that world, in eras as various as the settlement period to as long as five hundred years into the future, with other odds and ends tossed in as well.

Q: Interesting—thank you! It sounds like quite a hybrid of genres, so I imagine something like Substack would help you find your readers. It sounds like investigation, space fantasy, historical romance, and science fiction all at once (and of course, romance), which is fascinating. 

I’ve mostly used Substack to follow journalists, generally to learn more about niche interests, such as technology. How did you decide to use Substack for your publication needs? What about it appealed to you, as opposed to your own site, WattPad, Medium, Kindle self-publishing, etc?

A: I started nearly a year ago. To be honest, I’m not sure just what led me into it. It just happened. I sort of decided, “Hey, I need to be trying to get people to buy my books, and this feels like a good place to tempt people with bits and pieces.” One of my best readers emailed me with questions, and so I responded in depth. I proved confusing because I was just putting up random bits, so I said, “Heck, I’ll just serialize, in order, and see what happens. Worst thing that can happen, it’ll force me to keep producing.” So I have. I don’t think I’ve missed a single day for the entire time I’ve been on Substack.

The ease of use drew me in. I’d like to have more fine control in some ways, and the stats are not that great. However, the simplicity is a big sell. I hate new WordPress, and I’ve run websites before, and I am tired of doing the heavy lifting for that. I self-publish on Kindle, as I have a book finished (in theory), which means the published serial comes down off of Substack. Medium seems too closed, though I never tried it, and WattPad seems more fan-ficcy to me, not that there’s anything wrong with that. It just isn’t for me.

Q: Excellent answer. In terms of the fine control you wish you had, what do you mean by that? What features do you like particularly as a SFF author, and what features do you wish you had?

A: There are some typographical tools I wish I had. Some people seem able to do niftier things—probably using CSS—but I can’t figure them out, and I am wary of breaking the site. I’ve damaged WordPress sites like that before. I can’t do centering—I think—or right justification (maybe). And I know customer support is shallow and slow. It’s hard to set up a useful table of contents, and that’s my fault really—this really is just a newsletter site, not a place to write novels, and I am asking an awful lot of it.

The positives are that it’s largely fire and forget, though you gotta be careful with how you set up things to be posted in the future. When I paywall stuff, I really want it paywalled! It’s adult-only, and I have a gnawing fear of not doing it right.

But I really do love Substack. It’s the easiest platform I’ve ever used, and so as long as I respect its limitations, it’s ok. It places graphics, I pull in traffic through its Notes feature, and mostly it and I get along fine. I want to write, not wrestle with websites.

Q: Thank you for that. I’ve noticed your posts about what you put up on Substack, and I’ve tried to keep track of them, but I’d like to know your thinking on the backend. How often do you post a chapter for each story, and how long is each chapter generally?

A: I have varied my practice, but right now I post what you could call a “chapter” every day. It’s more a “unit” of about 1200-1500 words, which is a third of a book chapter for Dardana and Hee-young, and a full chapter for Krisa. Mondays I post a section from an ongoing short story serial; Tuesdays are writing-prompt days; Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are Dardana and Thessaly days, Saturday is Krisa, and Sunday is Hee-young. This is daily, so to keep pace I must put out 9000 words a week. Right now I am well ahead in some things, which is good, because I have other short stories I have to work on, as well as editing.

Q: You noted that you paywall some material. How do you decide to paywall, and how often do you do so? A: If they get in bed, the paywall goes up. People I know IRL see this; people to whom I sell regular, pedestrian SFF stories read it, so I don’t want to scar anyone. This is an intermittent thing, depending on the needs of story flow, but I also have another story or two I am working on veeeery slowly that are “in-world” erotica referenced by Dardana in passing, and no one needs to be reading that….. I just write it because it amuses me to explore their world and culture.

Q: I noticed that you sometimes respond to a prompt in your graphics. What is that? Where are you getting the prompt, and what’s that all about?

A: That comes from http://moreoddsthanends.home.blog. It’s a group of writers associated with the anthology press I’ve published with. I have learned a lot about my world by following these prompts. It’s a writing exercise, of course, but it will yield some books. I know a lot about the world of Iphigenia’s history just by doing it, and that’s resulted in stories that have gotten into anthologies. It’s fun to do as well. In fact, Dardana started in prompts and short stories, then turned into novels.

Q: How do you interact with your readers, if at all? Do you find yourself posting more or less of a given story based on reader response and favoritism?

A: I interact some. Usually people let me do my thing without comment, My paying people sometimes have questions, and we engage in discussions, which has led to me making choices about course and character. I mean, they are putting their time and resources and responses into it, and I respect that. I really want to write more of some things, but I’m not always sure how they will take it, so that material doesn’t progress as much as it could. Also, it gets a small slice of my already small audience, so I have to balance my time.

Other people interact as well, but usually in likes and shares.

Q: Do you make money from Substack based on folks signing up to follow you, or just from the paywall? Do you find that folks tend to buy your books based on what you have serialized on Substack? Does it tend to function as a kind of lead magnet?

A: I make virtually no money at all, and I suspect the money I do make is because those people want to read what’s paywalled. They appreciate, I think, the world for what it is, but the romantic payoff is important too. I sell some books—but at this point the Substack is a goal in and of itself, and if it makes me any more money in sales, it’s a happy coincidence. I make much more in anthologies than I do on my own.

Q: You said Substack is a goal in and of itself. Do you mean in terms of exposure, the conversations you have there, the shares people make, or because it helps to generate the books themselves? Do you tend to take a finished book serialized there and then publish it as an epub on, say, Amazon?

A: It generates the books, because I am driven to always post. I do not miss a day writing. The parasocial connection is important; though I’d like to know some of these people, most are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. I feel responsible to them, and responsible to my characters. 

Finished books go to Amazon. I hope to have The Pearl Crucible up in September. 

Exposure is… small. I have 333-ish subs and 900-ish “followers,” which are different categories, and maybe 80-90 regular readers, assuming the stats are believable. Substack Notes is my heavy exposure, but the people looking at my Notes stuff don’t overlap with the posts. It’s a double-barreled clientele. Some like classic art and Italian movie posters; some like SFF bodice rippers. It’s a many-faceted world.

I also have X and Instagram, but these are to me nearly useless and drive no traffic at all.

I fear the “in-world” naughty stuff will not go anywhere, lol… It would take another pen name and probably a different platform than Amazon.

Q: Heh, the uselessness of Instagram… yeah. I’ve had folks tell me trying to get a post to do super well there is basically down to stardust, and I can see that. Can you tell me a bit about the Notes feature? How do you tend to use it, how often, and what are the benefits thereof?

A: Notes is the social-media face of Substack. I think they envisioned it as newsletters and then you had a little garden of socials in-house. (They also have a chat feature but I use it approximately zero times a month.)

A lot of people use Notes to drive traffic in—you put something interesting up, and the algorithm brings in a bit of traffic. At first my Notes did not do much, but then I wrote enough of them, I guess, and now I have a regular following of hundreds. I gather Greco-Roman art and 19th-century classical revivalism, which fits the visual of my SFF, and people. Eat. That. Up. Apparently, diaphanously-garbed women and ancient artifacts attract eyeballs. Who knew. So I have a following of people who range from my target SFF romance to nudists (!) to LGBT folks to… people I would probably not hang out with. It is amazing, looking from behind the scenes, at what folks have in common. It gives me hope for humanity.

Dunno why people like 1960s Euro movie posters, but they do. It fits, I guess.

This has all failed to translate to huge numbers of readers, but I would say one third of my subs were followers bread-crumbing back from my Notes or my restacks of other people’s Notes.

My most popular Notes have 3000 views. My most popular posts have maybe 150. That should tell you something.

Q: Hmm. That’s fascinating. I do notice from my own reading behavior historically on Substack and Medium that I tend to like bite-size content, or at least shorter reads with great variety, so I could see a regular posting of something to Notes, on an app I have open anyways, would be very appealing. Do you talk about your books in Notes? Behind-the-scenes thoughts about chapters, inspiration, etc? Do you tend to talk about your life? I would think not in your particular case, but what seems to work for you?

A: My posts are probably too long, but since it’s really a repository for developing the books, and my readers are, I guess, like ARC Readers Lite, it’s ok. It serves the purpose. 

Myself? I am a terrible reader on Substack. Most things are agonizingly too long… and that’s the length I’m writing! I feel terrible about it, but I have so much to do I can’t read everything I want. The email generated from subscribing to dozens of active Substacks is tremendous. So I do what I do and hope for the best,

I don’t do any talking about anything, for the most part. I like to cultivate a certain mystique, and leaking personality is counterproductive, I think. As I’ve noted (heh), there is a Wide Variety of Anxious and Concerned People on Substack, and I prefer that all of them view me as they wish to view me. For our purposes, I have no personality, gender, opinions, location, or anything else. I do post promo graphics from Substack and from anthologies I’m published in or that I am boosting, but the Me that is me is mostly not there. I mean, I don’t hide me, exactly; it’s right there in the name of the Stack. But the pen is important. I treat her as a living woman in the 32nd century, and she has none of the same politics, social interests, or cultural concerns that we have, and she would view ours with surprise and dismay.

Q: That’s really fascinating, and I appreciate you allowing us to take a look behind the curtain some, in order to benefit other baby writers who have no idea what to do with Substack, if they do anything with it at all. I keep wanting to get to more “fun questions,” but I keep finding I have more basic questions as we go along. (Giving Basic Writer Girl Energy here.)

Okay. How do you operate to get found on Substack? What did you do in the beginning particularly? Do you think it’s smart use of tags, plus volume and regularity, in your case?

A: The secret to success on Substack is persistence plus interaction. I was skeptical of Notes, but it has yielded one third of my subs. I have been fortunate that a few Substacks have recommended me; this has probably given me one fourth to one third of my subs. The rest, well, they are people who stumbled across me by accident.

To start, I just began posting, then found my stride; in the first few months, I had reached maybe 30-40 subs. Then it just started moving up. I have had fast growth; I have had lulls. I think I am in a lull now. We’ll see if it changes seasonally. There is so much change and development all the time on the internet that it’s pure chaos theory. What is true today will not be next week.

Regular and frequent posting is probably the best. I may post too many times and too much at a time, so anyone who tries using Substack might try only a few times a week or less, and in shorter blocks; under 750 words, probably, but that’s a guess. I was posting 3 times a day, if you can believe it! I have a lot to say, it would seem. But that was too much for me, or anyone else.

I don’t have any sense that tags have value on Substack, but I hardly know everything. They may. I mostly use them to categorize the posts I put up. Maybe I’m missing something there.

If anyone says they have the secrets of Substack, they’re wrong or looking for money.

Q: Ah—good to know. Yeah, I’ve seen posting courses for authors out there, but I just don’t believe them. Okay, on to the questions that might be more fun. First off, what is something really strange or wild that’s happened to you on Substack, that maybe couldn’t happen anywhere else?

A: That’s a hard one. I hate to say the whole experience, but I think I would say that. The different people, the interests… it’s a revelation of humanity, which, like I said, gives me hope. People want story—they have the same hunger for it. It is encouraging and heartening that they do, and that they love beauty and happiness. Don’t ever forget that. We are given the liberty to hate each other, but I know that love will indeed conquer all. It has been just the best to learn this.

I sure couldn’t learn that anywhere else on the internet, and probably not as easily IRL.

Q: You’ve surprised me. I suppose my big question I would pose (and remember, this is for other authors who are trying to decide what to do and where to go) is whether you would recommend Substack? In other words, would you do it all again? And if so, what might you do differently as you grew your platform?

A: I do recommend Substack, with the proviso that I do that at this time, in the way it exists. The net is the net, and it changes. But for now, it has great advantages; the only challenge is to become visible, and that is a matter of whether you can be persistent, and whether you have something to say that others want to hear. I would do it all again, possibly tempering my enthusiasm to post as much as I did early on. 

I would start using Notes sooner; that’s the big thing I’d change.

Q: Thank you so much. Giving you the final word in this interview, what is something else you think people might need to know—about you, Substack, writing, life… Italian art… cyberpunk erotica… et cetera? 

A: Golly, so many options! I would say that I have come through this in a condition of deep adversity. There is no reason that I should be having even the modest success and enjoyment that I have been getting. But I chose that this would be life, not the troubles that surrounded me. I cannot apply the lessons I have learned to anyone else, because I do not have their experiences, but for me, writing, and Substack, and all of that, has become my life, and the prior life I allowed to pass away. We can choose light, no matter what is around us. 

~*~

Conclusion

Many experienced writers are right to warn that you never want to be too reliant on a single platform to get access to your audience. Platforms change, attract controversy and boycotts, alter their tools, generally enshitify, incorporate AI in ways that occasionally make you want to yank your hair out (looking at you, Wix), or update, migrate, sell out, and add subscriber tiers, all of which can make the platform unusable in the future. I’ve existed in enough fan and creator communities in enough eras of the internet to understand the truth of this in my bones, and that may be the case for you as well.

That being said, we all have to use a variety of tools, platforms, and technologies to find writer communities, advice, and to reach an audience. Just at this very moment, I have Discord open to monitor my writing group (where I’m an admin), SocialBee open to add content for the anthology I’m in, Goodreads open to grab text from a review, Canva open to work on a video for Instagram, two email accounts, my Wix page analytics… on and on and on. Being an author sometimes feels like part-time marketer and graphic design work, on top of the blogging and all the tech you have to learn.

As when writing a novel, it’s exciting when you start off; the first act can be fun and validating. Look—a nice Canva video that’s getting views! A blog entry people like! The small victories of taking control of your Goodreads author page or just bending Wix’s bucking bronco of an interface to your will for five seconds really stand out and make your day. But then comes the long, mushy middle. Posting promotions to Instagram, then feeling like you’re vexing or exhausting your friends and family. Making engagement posts to Facebook or Discord groups, then hearing a deafening chorus of crickets.

Screaming into the abyss, and it doesn’t even have the decency to scream back.

The sense I get is that people are sick of their own social media platforms, even as they scroll them in search of a nebulous entertaining something that doesn’t exist. They’re sick of ads and promotions. They’re sick of people promoting themselves. You may be offering good stories folks might genuinely enjoy (I bet you are!) from an indy author trying to break through and avoid an overwhelmingly commercial industry (which you definitely are). But as an author “selling” something, you’ll still fall into the background din of endless marketing and self-promotion in those spaces. Something to consider about an email list, a newsletter, or posting to a space like Substack, WattPad, or Medium, or any of their alternatives, is that people appear to be going there for stories. They’re there to read, not look at Reels or get lifestyle inspiration, and that in itself—that change in state of mind—might be all the advantage a thoughtful author needs. My thanks again to Urna Semper for doing this interview, and I truly hope you check out her writing, whether on Substack or by picking up a book where she's published. Choose light! Or, failing that, choose to ready about Dardana Fenek. She's a lot of fun.

To read more about Substack, authors, and the site’s current embroglio, you might find these articles useful:

Substack Is Both Great and Terrible for Authors | Jane Friedman

Substack’s “Nazi problem” won’t go away after push notification apology - Ars Technica