Publishing

Putting a story in front of readers, and taking it back.

What publishing does

A published story appears in the library, where anybody can read it — signed in or not. Publishing is per story, reversible, and does not publish your workings: chapters are published, character sheets and notes are not.

What readers see — the title, description, genres, rating, languages, credited creators and the poster — is edited on the book's own page. The publication screen is where you decide when it goes out: the switch that publishes the book, the chapters you release one at a time, and what the story is doing once it is out there.

Chapters, one at a time

Once a story is published, chapters are released individually. That is how a serial works: readers see what you have released and nothing else, and an unpublished chapter is invisible to them even though the story is public.

Age ratings

Every published story carries a rating. Mature-rated stories are shown only to signed-in readers who have confirmed their age, and are kept out of search engines.

Rate honestly. Misrating adult content to reach a wider audience is a breach of the terms, and it is the kind of thing readers report.

What readers get

A reader can follow a story, which notifies them when a chapter arrives — immediately, daily or weekly, their choice. They can rate it, comment where you allow comments, and their place is remembered so "continue reading" works across devices.

What you get back

The dashboard shows reads, how far people got, and where they stopped. It is aggregate: you can see that forty people stopped in chapter three, and never which forty.

Being found

Published stories are indexed by search engines: each has its own address, a description, a cover image for link previews, and structured data describing the book and its author. Chapters are linked from the story so a crawler can reach all of them.

Mature stories, search result pages and reader shelves are deliberately excluded from indexing.

Unpublishing

Reversible at any time. The story leaves the library and the pages stop resolving. Search engines take a while to notice, which is worth knowing if you are unpublishing because something is wrong.