Palahniuk to release new book on Substack

Fight Club (Vintage) author Chuck Palahniuk is the latest writer to serialise his new book on the online platform Substack.

The platform enables readers to subscribe to individual writers, receiving their posts "newsletter style" via email. Palahniuk’s 16th novel, Greener Pastures, will be published in regular instalments from 27th September, at a subscription price of $6 a month or $40 a year (£4.40/£30). The first three chapters will be made available for free. 

Last month Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie announced that he was publishing his new work, The Seventh Wave, online using the page Salman's Sea of Stories, after his agent Andrew Wylie was approached. 

The Guardian reported that Palahniuk was approached by Substack to publish his next work on the platform and was drawn to an offering of editorial independence. “That’s really attractive, the idea that you don’t have somebody editing the content of your work", he said. 

Substack has paid Palahniuk an upfront sum for Greener Pastures. There are no conditions attached to what he writes, the paper reported. The serialisation will also include short stories from Palahniuk as well as lessons on writing and how to navigate the publishing industry.

Palahniuk, whose most recent books have been published in the UK by Corsair, said his new work started out as a piece of young adult fiction and became “really dark and somewhat sexualised”. It depicts “the crisis young people face as they must choose a career, a partner, and find a home and job,” and is about a group of high school students who are offered the chance to auction themselves off as successors to billionaires and royalty around the world.

He added that his current publishers would have first refusal on publishing a print version of the novel. He said: “My readership tends to be completist and they want copies of all the books."