Salman Rushdie to serialise next book online

One of this era’s most famous authors to publish next book on newsletter platform Substack, where subscribers pay to see each new chapter.

Booker Prize-winning author, Salman Rushdie, said his newsletter would give him a ‘closer relationship with readers’. Picture: Supplied

Many classic novels reached the public for the first time in instalments. Now one of this era’s most famous authors has turned to serialisation.

Salman Rushdie, author of Midnight’s Children, has announced that he is to publish his next work of fiction as a serialised novella on the newsletter platform Substack, where subscribers will pay to see each new chapter.

The novella, The Seventh Wave, would be serialised in weekly instalments over the course of a year. Rushdie, 74, said that the story, about a film director and an actor, would be written in the style of New Wave cinema, with “disjunctions and crash cuts and gangsters”.

Rushdie’s move on to Substack is a considerable triumph for the San Francisco-based newsletter platform, which has been enjoying a wave of success over the past year. It allows writers to publish email newsletters that readers can subscribe to and read in their inbox or online. Writers usually provide a mix of free and paid content, and Substack takes a 10 per cent cut of fees.

The company was founded in 2017 and has thrived during the pandemic. There are more than half a million subscribers paying for at least one newsletter, and the most successful writers make more than $1.35 million a year.

Never not going to be amazed that Patti Smith is doing poetry through her Substack. https://t.co/Smbw0gBKf4

— Hamish McKenzie (@hamishmckenzie) August 26, 2021

The platform has attracted well-known US journalists such as Casey Newton, who writes a widely read tech newsletter called Platformer, Matthew Yglesias, the co-founder of the American current affairs analysis website Vox, and the activist-journalist Glenn Greenwald. The singer-songwriter Patti Smith and the Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret also use it.

The company got in touch with Rushdie’s literary agent Andrew Wylie asking if he wanted to join. Rushdie said that he was persuaded after seeing that Keret and Smith were using it.

The Booker Prize-winning author said that although readers would be charged to read chapter instalments of The Seventh Wave he would also write free content, including short stories, literary gossip and writing about books, TV, plays and films. The newsletter is called Salman’s Sea of Stories.

“The point of doing this is to have a closer relationship with readers, to speak freely, without any intermediaries or gatekeepers,” he wrote in his first post yesterday (Thursday). “There’s just us here, just you and me, and we can take this wherever it goes.”

The new post is up NOW on my Substack, SALMAN'S SEA OF STORIES, at https://t.co/1rXlZ82UA3 - I'm chatting about Luis Buñuel, Jeanne Moreau, and Charlie Chaplin. Come on over!

— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) September 2, 2021

He told The Guardian: “People have been talking about the death of the novel almost since the birth of the novel . . . but the actual, old-fashioned thing, the hard-copy book, is incredibly, mutinously alive. And here I am having another go, I guess, at killing it.”

Lots of 19th century novels were originally serialised in periodicals, including Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers. The form appears to be having a resurgence. Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, released his latest novel, The Shards, as a fortnightly podcast on the membership platform Patreon.

Juliet Mushens, a literary agent at Mushens Entertainment, said she had noticed writers experimenting with the idea. One of her clients, the fantasy children’s writer Taran Matharu, got more than seven million reads serialising his novel on Wattpad. However, she added: “I don’t necessarily think it will become hugely common: writers I have spoken to who have done it say that the challenge is that you might change your mind about the story as you go on, or slightly write yourself into a corner.”

The Times