On Releasing This Novel for Free, One Chapter at a Time

The manuscript was just about finished. I’d been having so much fun and frustration while writing it, along with many nights when I couldn’t stop writing in my head when I should have been sleeping. The question, then, was what came next.

The expected answer is familiar. Find a literary agent, submit to publishers, wait for an institution with the right credentials to decide whether the work deserves to reach readers and on what terms. For the right book, at the right moment, that process makes sense. It wasn’t the right process for this one.

Part of the reason was practical. Traditional publishing moves slowly. I was ready to put this novel into the world now, not in two or three years. But practical reasons alone don’t fully explain a decision that shapes the entire relationship between a writer and their readers. The more interesting explanation starts a few years earlier.

In 2022, I collaborated with my dear friend Daryl Hatton and his talented team at ConnectionPoint on creating Crowdfundr, a platform built for creators who wanted to fund their work directly from their audience. In that work, I met writers, artists, comics makers, and filmmakers who had decided to build direct relationships with their readers rather than route everything through institutional gatekeepers. Some found large audiences. Some found small ones. Nearly all of them got their work into the world on their own terms and connected with the people who genuinely wanted it. That model changed how I thought about what publishing was actually for.

There’s one other thing worth naming plainly. I used AI as part of my writing process—as a tool for structure, revision, and iteration, in service of my own judgment and voice. That’s a subject worth its own essay, and it will get one. The short version is that traditional publishing currently regards AI-assisted work on a spectrum from trepidation to hostility. That may change. I’d still consider a conventional path if genuine interest arrived. But it wasn’t the path for this moment, and I wasn’t willing to wait for an industry in the middle of its own reckoning to sort itself out before I could introduce myself to readers.

I’m releasing the novel for free, because I’m an unknown novelist asking strangers to trust me with their time and attention. A publisher’s stamp, when it exists, functions as pre-authorisation, an institution with standing has already decided the work is worth your hours. I don’t have that. What I have is the novel itself, and the honest way to offer it is openly without payment, to remove any barrier between you and the first page. If the work earns your time, you’ll know that for yourself. If it doesn’t, you’ve lost twenty minutes. That seems like the right arrangement for a first novel by a writer who hasn’t yet earned your trust.

There’s something else beneath the practical argument. I want readers before I want anything else. Art exists fully only when someone else has experienced it—interpreted it in the context of their own lives. Building a direct, ungated relationship with readers is more valuable to me than any advance or contract could be.

I’m releasing the novel in serial form, because something is genuinely gained in the waiting. Streaming has made us accustomed to consuming narrative in long, unbroken stretches. You can read this novel straight through if you prefer when all of the chapters are published. But publishing one chapter at a time creates a different kind of reading.

A chapter arrives. You read it. Then you carry it for a week before the next one comes. In that interval, the story stays active in a way that continuous reading doesn’t quite allow. You have time to sit with what a character decided. To wonder at the end of a chapter about the consequences before the next one explains or complicates them. There’s a pleasure in anticipation that saturation has made easy to forget. The week between chapters is not empty. It’s space for the kind of reflection that makes fiction more than entertainment.

There’s also the question of commitment. Asking a reader who doesn’t know me to invest twelve or fourteen hours in a novel is a significant ask. Asking them to spend twenty or forty minutes with a single chapter is a much smaller one. If that chapter earns their return, the next ask is easier. Trust builds in proportion to what the work has actually earned, not what I’ve claimed on its behalf. That seems more honest than demanding the full commitment upfront from readers who have no reason yet to extend it.

I write because I want to affect a reader. Fiction that makes a person feel something they hadn’t felt before, or think carefully about something they’d stopped examining, or sit with a discomfort they usually avoid—that’s what I’m trying to make. The serial form, with its replies and reactions and the occasional reader who writes back with what the last chapter made them think about, gives me that conversation in something closer to real time. A finished book sitting in a shop doesn’t.

I’m not asking anyone to wait for someone else’s permission before deciding whether this is worth their time. The novel is here. The first chapter is one click away. Now it’s up to you.

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