News S J Watson experiments with serialising draft novel, as he writes it, on Substack

[E G Logan]

S J Watson has published three novels (one a Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth film) through the traditional publishing route. But now he's experimenting with something different: he's making public the first drafts of his chapters as he writes them, on Substack.

He admits it is scary, and that normally he has a lot more planned out. He's really making it up as he goes along, and inviting comments from his followers on things like the characters and where the plot might go.

His comments were ahead of a podcast for The Novelry. If this link doesn't work, come back to me and I will try to precis, in a non-plagiarism way.

S J Watson Is Serialising A Novel on Substack

The multi-million-selling author of Before I Go To Sleep is serialising a new novel on Substack, the email newsletter service. Find out more about this fascinating writing process.

www.thenovelry.com

 

[E G Logan]

Argh! Re-reading this, I realise it might seem I meant it as an endorsement of this author's website. I apologise if it seemed so, but it was absolutely not intended that way.

The point I should have made much more clearly was that Watson is aiming here at would-be authors, and makes the interesting (to me, anyway) suggestion that just because we have always written our books a certain way, that is not the only possibility. Going for a new, 'scary' alternative – which he likens to 'writing ... naked in a perspex box suspended from ... Brighton pier' – might bring back the fun to the process, he says.

His Substack chapters are available free, so his intention was not to get rich.