The Serial Fiction Novel with a Billion Plus Views

Part Two of "Do We Really Want Email Novels?"

Dec 03, 2023

*First off, thank you so much to everyone who bought my new novel, Acid Christmas! I’ve sold 70 paperback copies now, whoo hoo! But I’d love to get to 100 paper and hardback copies sold before Christmas. If you haven’t read it, grab it off Amazon, where I get the highest royalty percentage.

**This is a meaty post, and it will be truncated by some email servers. If you aren’t reading in the Substack app, please open this in your browser to see the whole thing.

Over a year ago, I wrote about serial fiction on Substack in a piece called Do We Really Want Email Novels? In the essay, I considered whether to release my novel, Acid Christmas, in serial form in advance of the paper and hardback. This article was recently reshared multiple times, and though almost nothing about serial fiction on Substack has changed in the past year, the serial format continues to grow in popularity on other platforms.

So, I thought I’d give you an update on the biggest players in serial fiction.

In this essay, I’m going to explore:

“Serials” vs “Series” vs “Sequential eShorts”
The top 3 serial fiction platforms:
- Wattpad, 94 million readers
- Webtoons, 85.6 million readers
- Webnovel, 75 million users
What my next serial fiction piece will cover

***This post will appeal to readers looking to try serial fiction and to fiction writers wishing to understand the serial fiction marketplace.

In this Lagoon, I write weekly around books, writing, culture, self-experimentation, and mind-expanding modalities.

Who I’m excluding and why:

I’m not covering any audio serial sites, like story podcasts, Audible shorts, Dispsea app, Tempt, etc.
Substack has 35+ million users, a sizeable number, but I’m not able to segment users who read serial fiction vs non-fiction on the platform, so I won’t be including it here.
Non-English Language Serial Fiction sites.
- I’m sticking to the biggest English language sites for serial fiction because that’s what I can read. There are, however, thriving serial fiction sites in China with just as many users, such as JinJiang Literature City, AKA—JJWXC, publisher of the famous, Heaven’s Official Blessing, and Qidian, which published the popular serial novel Lord of Mysteries. Though I’ll give you a taste of their home screens:

Qidian’s home page for Chinese serial novels.

Terminology

First, we must distinguish between Series and Serials and the new emergence of Sequential eShorts. Book series, as in a series of linked novels, like The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, are as popular as ever, but they are not what I’m focusing on in this article.

By “serials” I mean books released in digital format serially, chapter by chapter, or scene by scene, episode by episode, and offered on a web browser or a mobile app.

An in-between category I call “Sequential eShorts” is also emerging as a result of self-published authors wanting to rapid-release series. These are short books linked into a series and offered on all the major book retail sites, as well as on the serial fiction sites listed below. Each “book” is actually a short story, a single act of a novel, or multiple scenes in a novel divided up into standalone units. They’re usually under 10k words, but they have book covers, book listing pages, and function like a series of novels. They’re released only in eBook form, as they’re too short to print until the full series is complete and can be bundled together into a paperback. The emergence of sequential shorts is also tied to the rise of the “DayBook,” and a general publishing industry trend towards shorter books, which I discussed here.

For writers, this video offers more explanation on what I mean by Rapid Release Sequential eShorts:

Serial Fiction with a Billion + Views

While serial fiction hasn’t taken off on Substack the way many writers hoped it would, due to factors outlined in the comments here:

Serial fiction and Sequential eShorts are growing in popularity on other platforms targeted mostly to GenZ.

These are the top three most popular serial fiction platforms:

#1 Wattpad

Wattpad is the number one place for reading serial fiction, hosting 94 million active users, according to the company. The most popular genres on Wattpad are fan fiction, romance, and dark erotica, and the current most-read serial is a Harry Styles fan fic serial called P.S. I Hate You, viewed 118 million times.

Writers generally aren’t paid on Wattpad, though some of the biggest books get picked up by traditional publishers, movie studios, or by Wattpad itself. Wattpad encourages authors to release chapters as fast as possible, for example, once a day, or once a week. All reading is done online or in the mobile app. Wattpad sticks to the traditional book terminology of “books” and “chapters,” while other platforms have shifted into television language like “series” and “episodes.”

The cool thing to me about Wattpad is that readers can comment on individual lines, highlight, like, and comment on other readers’ comments. It isn’t a stretch to say that Wattpad is the most interactive and most social fiction reading platform of all time.

An example of what I mean by line commenting from the Wattpad book *Float* by Toasted Bagels.

Why is Wattpad the Number One Serial Fiction Platform?

It’s very simple. Wattpad is free, and it has the best user interface for reading serial fiction. I tested them all. Webtoons is also very easy to use and mostly free, but it isn’t as interactive as Wattpad. Wattpad wins the price and the best design award for the serial fiction experience.

There is also a lot of totally GONZO stuff on Wattpad that would never be traditionally published.

However, I stopped using Wattpad because it doesn’t pay most of its authors. Stories read 500,000 times could still get zero payout. Wattpad is also a content and user data mining machine, mining reader habits and trends and selling them to publishers and movie studios without giving the original authors any revenue share.

For example, let’s say you write a vampire cowboy space opera gay romance and it blows up on Wattpad. Next thing you know, Netflix produces a gay cowboy vampire space opera romance series in Korea and you never see a dime.

Still, Wattpad is a great way to test reading serial fiction, especially for people who don’t have credit cards, can’t buy ebooks, or access libraries. I love that teenagers in rural Burundi can read unlimited novels for free on Wattpad, just so long as they have low-speed internet.

For a taste of the Wattpad craziness without using the app, check out this video:

#2 Webtoons

Webtoons is 100% graphic novels, comic books, and manga released in serial form and it claims 85.6 million active users according to the company, which is owned by the same Korean parent company as Wattpad. The most popular genres are fantasy and romance. Webtoons has a payment subscriber system for authors, with the top authors earning around $1 million a month. Anyone can upload their graphic novel or comic to Webtoons.

When I look at my own 15-year-old daughter’s screen time, most of it is devoted to Webtoons. She’s all over the platform and knows so much about Korean novels in particular that it boggles my mind, especially since when I was her age, growing up in rural Appalachia, I had essentially no access to Korean graphic novels. We’ve come such a long way in my lifetime in terms of being able to read fiction from anywhere in the world and with no gatekeepers. No publishers; no agents required. This, I think, is completely amazing.

Their page reminds me of an old school TV guide schedule.

At present, the most popular serial on Webtoons is Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe, a YA romance retelling of the life of the Greek goddess Persephone. Viewed 1.3 billion times, Lore Olympus may also be the most popular English language fiction web serial of all time on any platform. Not bad numbers for a young writer from New Zealand who doesn’t even have her own Wikipedia page.

The cover of the first episode of Lore Olympus

Like Wattpad, Webtoons also produces spin-off deals for popular writers. For example, Penguin Random House picked up and published book versions of Lore Olympus, with the novels hitting the NYTimes bestseller list, and the Jim Henson Company partnered with Webtoons to produce the series as an animated television show.

Meet the author of Lore Olympus:

Webtoons showcases a list of their series now adapted for television and Wikipedia maintains an even longer list of IP that began on the open platform. The reverse trend also occurs and popular TV shows like Extraordinary Attorney Woo are adapted into Webtoons.

#3 Webnovel

Webnovel claims 75 million users globally and hosts around 400k novels in addition to comics and fan fiction. However, it’s hard to say how many users are on the English version of the site vs the Chinese version. Though many of the English books have millions of views, so I’ll assume it’s a solid base.

Webnovel claims to offer authors the highest royalty rate in the serial fiction game, offering 50% royalties plus cash bonuses whenever you hit their lists or win their contests. They also pay writers to update more frequently with tokens that the writers can use to read other stories. The coins only go to writers who upload daily for at least two months. Finally, they use a minimum guarantee system, where if an author earns between $60-$200 dollars in a month, they automatically round up the number to $200.

Let me tell you that $200 a month is more than most self-published authors earn on all book retailers combined.

Oddly, WebNovel categorizes books by the gender of the main character/gender of the reader preference. So in the rankings, you must select the reader’s gender preference and you only get male or female. I guess trans/non-binary books don’t count on Webnovel…

The top “man” book is the English translation of Library of Heaven’s Path, by Heng Sao Tian Ya, which is a fantasy action book with 180.7 million views.

The top “female” book is the English translation of Full Marks Hidden Marriage: Pick Up a Son, Get a Free Husband, a romantic comedy by Jiong Jiong You Yao with 452.1M Views. This also appears to be the most popular book on Webnovel.

And there you have it, the top three players in the serial fiction English market. All are owned by non-American companies.

What Comes Next:

I have two more posts on serial fiction to share with you in the coming months because I believe this format is growing and will become more relevant in the future, and because reading serial fiction could be an anecdote to people’s social media addictions, a bridge between doom scrolling IG and reading/finishing novels.

In my next posts on this topic, I’ll cover:

Archive of our Own (AO3)
Radish
Royal Road
Tapas
Kindle Unlimited Short Reads
A more in-depth discussion on Rapid Release Sequential eShorts
Kindle Vella
Serial fiction hosted on the author’s websites
My favorite serial fiction projects you’ve never heard of
Why serial fiction is the anecdote to stolen focus

Now You

Please tell me what you think. Do you struggle to read entire novels?

Have you ever read any serial fiction on any of the platforms mentioned in this post?

What about on other platforms?

If you have kids, do your kids read on any of these platforms?

Charlotte Dune's Lagoon

Discussion about this post