What is the point of the novel in 2026? Is it still a useful narrative form in the age of scrolling shortform videos while Netflix plays in the background? Putting video to one side, why read a self-contained story on a page when text-based narrative can be encountered in so many other formats and contexts? We now have podcast comment sections, social-media feuds, retweets and pile-ons, all-lowercase personal essays about romantic liaisons, pithy jokes plastered above cruel memes, conspiratorial greentexts on 4chan, and deeply unsettling Reddit confessionals.
If we want people to read novels in the era of shortened attention spans, then we need to find a form for the novel that meets the moment. In short, we need a revival of the serial novel.
“Many of my favorite reads of the past year have been serialized novels.”
And that is just what we are seeing. Several of my favorite reads of the past year have been serialized novels I read via an app on my phone, receiving the chapters piecemeal, a week at a time. A century and a half after the golden age of Dickens, Eliot, and Dumas, the “cultural engine” of Substack has given the serialized novel a new lease on life.
Serializing novels on the internet is not a new phenomenon. The early internet was stuffed full of fake diary entries and episodic fiction. The 1990s brought readers the “cyber-soap opera” The Spot, a regular diary of fictional characters who visit the same beach house, featuring photos and videos along with text. It was groundbreaking for its time and is still impressive today. The 2000s saw the dramatic rise of fanfiction sites and popular blogs, culminating in the twin success stories of E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey and Andy Weir’s The Martian in the early 2010s.
But all of this existed alongside a thriving traditional publishing industry, and both James and Weir found a wider readership once traditional publishers picked up their serialized fiction and repackaged it between two covers. But as people read fewer books and spend increasing amounts of time on social media, this pathway can no longer be the only answer. That is where Substack comes in.
Substack fully committed to becoming a social media site in 2023, adding a feed for short-form notes as well as a mobile app. This was the turning point that gave the serialized novel a chance to reach a wider readership again. Prior to this, even popular writers like Elle Griffin found novel serialization on Substack to be unpopular compared to standard newsletter fare. Griffin serialized her first novel, Obscurity, throughout 2021 and 2022, but after polling her forty-five paid subscribers she found out that none of them were interested in her novel compared to her non-fiction science newsletter.
The transformation of Substack into a true social media site in 2023 brought in many new readers (according to Bloomberg, the app now has 5.5 million monthly active users and 1.5 million daily active users). This influx boosted discoverability for writers who didn’t already have a large audience, leading to an uptick in the success of novels first published on Substack.
Probably the clearest example is John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, serialized throughout 2023 and 2024, and subsequently picked up by Belt Publishing in 2025. The novel has been positively reviewed by legacy institutions, but the main catalyst for the book’s popularity was the writer Ross Barkan publishing an interview with Pistelli in his Substack newsletter Political Currents. Pistelli was not a particularly popular writer at the time, and his book is far more experimental and literary than the popular genre work of The Martian or Fifty Shades of Grey. But the outsized interest in Major Arcana came from the hubub of discussion about the novel within the Substack site itself. The new social-media ecosystem helped readers find novels, and then the algorithm served them even more content related to the fiction they were reading, until a publisher became aware of the quality of the serialized novel and sought to publish it in book format.
This change to how readers engage with long-form fiction—reading it in bite-sized chunks, diving into comment threads while waiting for the next part to drop, sharing their favorite quotes, and writing reviews on their own publications, all while staying on the same site—has also led to some fascinating experiments in the “social-mediafication” of the novel. Last year, Pilcrow Magazine started a “serialized novel competition” where subscribers are invited to vote on excerpts of unpublished novels; the winner is then serialized over the subsequent months.
“The novella momentarily transformed my phone into a mirror.”
That was how I came across novelist and playwright Matthew Gasda’s delicately spun novella Seasons Clear, and Awe, a multigenerational family study set in the 1990s and 2000s. One of Gasda’s characters is obsessed with writers who are too self-conscious to write well, believing that true literary genius can only come from those who aren’t watching themselves perform the act of writing. “To me,” this character says, “no one but a country bumpkin, small bit actor, or similar non-entity could have written the works of [William Shakespeare]. They are a miracle of nature—anything more than the slightest touch of literary self-consciousness would have obliterated them.” The irony of reading passages like this on a social media app made the themes land even more effectively. The novella momentarily transformed my phone into a mirror, calling out the performative desires inherent in being a writer using social media. The fact that Gasda is himself a regular presence on the site, publishing his own writer’s diary and sitting on the masthead of the Substack-based literary magazine Romanticon, means that as a reader, you get to watch in real-time how he engages with and refines such ideas and themes.
Another example of how Substack is helping fiction meet the moment comes from the Swedish writer and museum curator Jörgen Löwenfeldt, who has published both short and longform fiction in his newsletter The Bagatelles. He has recently embarked on a “windchime” fiction project where he provides his readers with five possible avenues for the narrator to take at the end of each chapter. Readers then get to vote over the course of the week, and the majority vote indicates which of the five possible plot developments Löwenfeldt will post next. It’s like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, except none of the other possible pathways are ever published.
Among all the serialized Substack novels I have read, the standout is Sam Kahn’s Henchman, which begins as a parody of old Bond movies and then pushes into a dizzying array of genre-bending plots and philosophical debates. Henchman details Banx Mulvaney’s journey from employee in the service of the diabolical Ernst Blofield—holding the coveted position of Head of Inner Perimeter Security—to becoming a supervillain in his own right, a quixotic quest from evil lairs and tropical locales to the streets of New York and distant planets. In lesser hands, this would be nothing more than pastiche, a nostalgia trip sending up the tropes of spy and action films. But Kahn pushes deeper, sending Banx on a quest for meaning in a world that feels rigged. The result speaks to a moment of runaway economic inequality and speculation about global conspiracies.
Because only one part of the story is made available each week, the serialized format forces the reader to slow down, to settle into the section and spend time with the characters. That said, because the form doesn’t reward brevity, Substack novels tend to feel a little shaggy. Most would no doubt benefit from some editing. But the form really does lend itself well to a narrative style which is diaristic and confessional, which is where Kahn’s novel worked better for me than many others. Banx Mulvaney is simply an intriguing and enjoyable narrator to hang out with.
A lot of this comes down to Banx’s positive and aspirational streak. Beyond the twirling sub-plots featuring Indiana Jones, John Wick, and more, the real story is how Banx makes the leap from henchman to man, becoming someone with control over his own life, pursuing his own desires instead of being subject to the power wielded by the nearest psychopath.
“I am cautiously optimistic about where we’re headed.”
Perhaps Kahn’s novel resonated because reading it imparted some of Banx’s optimism to me. On any given day that I open the Substack app, I get to read news, poetry, political commentary, cultural analysis, short stories, theological treatises, psychology studies, and serialized novels, all in one place. And I get to interact with the people writing them and witness them interact with each other. It’s like constantly being inside a publishing house meets editors room meets bookstore meets launch party meets Q&A session. No wonder this is where engaged readers are hanging out. And no wonder serialized novels are getting a new lease on life here. If this is the future of literature, then I am cautiously optimistic about where we’re headed.