FicStack is closing

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I’ve been sitting with this longer than I should have. Partly because I kept hoping something would shift, and partly because I didn’t quite know how to write it. Which is a strange position for a writer to be in.

So: FicStack is closing.

Sylvienne Ethara and I built FicStack to solve a problem we kept running into ourselves. Serialised fiction on Substack is genuinely hard to find if you don’t already know where to look. The platform isn’t built for discovery the way a bookshop is, or even the way a library is. You can search, but you need the right words, and you need to already know what you’re looking for.

What we wanted was something closer to the feeling of browsing. Not just by genre, though genre was part of it, but by subgenre, by mood, by theme. The kind of granular, felt sense of a story that makes you think yes, that one, that’s the one I want right now. Horror with a folk horror edge. Quiet domestic unease. Science fiction about grief. Literary dark fiction that doesn’t flinch. We indexed close to 1000 publications, built a volunteer curator network, and tried, genuinely tried, to make a corner of Substack’s fiction ecosystem more visible and more navigable.

I’m proud of that. I think it worked, for a while, for the people it reached.

The Discord community closed a few months ago, and if I’m honest, that was the first sign of what was coming. Since then I’ve spent time going back through the analytics properly, trying to see the full picture clearly rather than through hope. The numbers don’t lie. FicStack was underutilised, significantly and consistently, in ways that made it hard to justify the time and cost of keeping it alive. That’s not a comfortable thing to write, but it would feel dishonest to close without saying it plainly. We built something good. Not enough people found it. Those two things can both be true.

Running FicStack properly takes time I don’t have enough of, and money the project doesn’t generate. The analytics made the decision easier to accept, even if not easier to make.

So we’re closing cleanly rather than letting it quietly stop working.

To the curators who gave their time, their taste, and their care to this: you were the best version of what we hoped it could be. The indexing was the mechanism. You were the reason any of it meant anything.

To the writers we indexed: you don’t need us to keep going. You never did. We just tried to make you a little more findable for a while, and I hope some of you were.

The idea at the heart of FicStack, that kind of deep, nuanced, mood-first fiction discovery, isn’t one I’m done with. I don’t know what shape it comes back in, or when, but I don’t think I’m finished with the problem. Watch this space. No promises, but a door left ajar.

Thank you for everything you gave it.

Gary & Sylvienne