Write More With Simon K Jones

Hopefully you’ve all seen Shane Bzdok’s excellent work on the new cover for The Mechanical Crown: It’s been a long old road to get to that cover. About twenty years, by my count. You can check out the story itself here: TMC is a project that has been rolling around inside my head since my early 20s, albeit in very different forms. It was technically the first manuscript I ever completed, way back in 2010. That version was very bad, but it was an important milestone regardless.

You’re reading my weekly serial The Mechanical Crown. Find out more here: A lost explorer. A child slave. A princess. An ancient shame to be kept secret. A society on the edge of collapse. Subscribe to receive a new chapter every Friday. A blackened finger lay in the snow, necrotic, oozing and sickly. Red on white, a puddle of blood melting into a hole, a spattered pattern as if from a flicked paintbrush, fresh from the incision. The skin was tight and swollen after days of abuse, the nail long gone.

If you’re thinking of trying to write your own serial fiction project, you’re in the right place. This is a 7-hour masterclass conversation presented in six parts from myself and S.E. Reid, discussing everything to do with the process of serialisation. We’ve been in the trenches and have worked on many serial projects, so everything we talk about comes from direct experience.

Here it is, part 6 of our 5-part mini-series on Crafting serial fiction. As is appropriate for a series all about serials, we ended up running over slightly. This episode is something of a wrap-up. What are your options once you’ve completed the serialisation of your story? You have a manuscript ready to be transformed into other forms, so how can you make that happen?

Betteridge’s Law of Headlines states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” When journalists and reviewers frame a title as a question, it intrinsically suggests the presence of significant doubt; otherwise they would simply state it as fact. So, is Deckle a Scrivener replacement? No. Not yet. At this point I imagine the more pressing question is “what the heck is a Deckle?” Before we begin: Deckle kindly provided me with early access to the software.

Substack have rolled out a nifty new feature, which you’ll find in the editor under the More menu: Audience-specific content makes it possible to build chunks of your newsletter which are only visible to specific cohorts. When you add one of the blocks it looks something like this: You can adjust who receives it, add anything you like into the content area, and optionally include alternative content for anyone not in the specified audience. This isn’t a screenshot.

A few years ago I decided to publish my 2020 serial No Adults Allowed as a paperback and ebook. As with all my major projects, I’d written it in Scrivener. While I love Scrivener as a writing tool, it doesn’t really work for me as a design tool. Exporting a pretty book is harder than it should be! I turned to Reedsy Studio, and had a good time using it to produce the paperback. Quick and easy, free to use, with decent end results.

A lost explorer. A child slave. A princess. An ancient shame to be kept secret. A society on the edge of collapse. From the author of Tales from the Triverse: Subscribe to receive a new episode every Friday The Mechanical Crown takes you to Lagonia, a huge valley hidden within a ring of impassable mountains. Cut off from the rest of the world, it is about to receive its first visitor for centuries. How this works: This weekly serial is free to read.

We get to the big one: making money. Or, at least, it can be the big one, if you allow it. If you want it, there are levers to pull. You may want to simply write and not be sullied by the vagaries of capitalism. Perhaps there’s a happy place somewhere in the middle. In part 5 we poke at what we’ve done to turn our writing into an income stream of sorts. You may have noticed that neither me nor S.E. Reid are livestreaming from a mega-yacht, so use that to calibrate expectations.

You’ve planned what you’re doing, you’ve started putting words to the page, and you’ve published some chapters of your serial fiction project. Part 4 of our Crafting serial fiction mini-series attempts to grapple with that exact question.