The Intrinsic Podcast continues upon a theme. If the inaugural episode with last guest Adam Mastroianni was about science outside of academia, this one with Elle Griffin is about writing outside the traditional publishing industry. Who’s Elle? She writes the Substack The Novelleist, has written for outlets like Esquire and Forbes, and is working on her own serialized novel and kickstarted book. I first found her via her great breakdowns of the economics of writing online, like her “Writing books is not really a good idea.”
Elle and I discuss the abysmal number of book sales for even prize-winning books, why famous writers don’t make their money from their writing alone, people who sell 12 books a year for a million dollars each, Werewolf erotica, and why there hasn’t been a breakthrough hit of serialized fiction on Substack, like how Serial broke open the podcast genre back in 2014.
In fact, talking to Elle I even had a bit of a personal epiphany about serialization being a form of “secret engagement sauce” that was used by authors of the past (from Dickens to Dumas) but which has been abandoned by a lot of traditionally published fiction, excluding sci-fi and fantasy (and thus perhaps explaining some of those genres massive success these past few decades).
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