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Chapters

Writing or importing chapters, Open and Members chapters, Reading Mode, and scheduling a release.

Where chapters live

You can publish a book on your site whole, a few sample chapters at a time, or one chapter a week. Chapters can be reached in two places:

  • Inside a book: open the book under Catalogue → Books and choose the Chapters tab. This is the best place to work: you can drag chapters into order, import a manuscript, and schedule a run of chapters.
  • Catalogue → Chapters: every chapter of every book in one list, which you can filter by book or status.

Write a chapter

Press New chapter, in a book’s Chapters tab or in the list of all chapters, and fill in:

  • Order in the book, the Title, and the Slug, its part of the web address, which only has to be unique within the book.
  • Status: Draft chapters are visible to you and nobody else.
  • Access: Open to everyone or Members only (see below).
  • Unlock date: leave it empty to unlock the chapter as soon as it is published, or see scheduling below.
  • The chapter: the text itself. The editor has bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, links, two levels of heading, quotations, lists and alignment.
  • Author’s Note: optional. A word from you after the chapter, set apart from the story: thanks, context, what comes next.

The Preview button at the top of a chapter opens it as readers will see it, drafts and all, through a private link that works for an hour.

Import a manuscript from Word

In a book’s Chapters tab, press Import manuscript and choose a Word document saved as .docx, up to 10 MB.

  • Each chapter starts at Heading 1 or Heading 2: the Word style you gave your chapter titles. Each heading becomes one chapter, and text before the first heading is left out.
  • Access is set for every imported chapter; you can change any of them afterwards.

Every chapter arrives as a Draft, after the chapters already in the book. Paragraphs, italics, bold, lists, sub-headings and scene breaks come across; images do not. A chapter title already in the book is skipped, so importing the manuscript again only adds what is new. If nothing is imported, the message says why, most often because the chapter titles do not use Word’s heading styles.

Open and Members chapters

Each chapter’s Access decides who can read it:

  • Open to everyone: anyone can read it. Open chapters are your free sample.
  • Members only: for readers who join your site, which is free and takes only an email address. A visitor sees the chapter’s title and a note that it is for members, with buttons to join or sign in; the chapter itself is never sent to them. See Members.

You can change a chapter’s Access straight from the list in a book’s Chapters tab.

Reading mode: Full or Sample

Each book also has a Reading mode, under Availability on the book itself:

  • Full: the whole book is on your site, its Members chapters for Members.
  • Sample: for a book on sale. Only the Open chapters are shown; Members chapters are hidden from everyone, Members included, and readers are pointed at where to buy it.

Switching to Sample changes no chapter, so switching back to Full shows the Members chapters again, with readers’ progress kept. It is the way to serialise a book for your Members and then take it down to a sample when it goes on sale.

Scheduling a release

Give a Published chapter an Unlock date in the future and it is scheduled: listed on the book’s page with its date (“Unlocks 16 October”), but nobody can read it until then. At the time you set, it unlocks by itself, and an Open chapter appears in your feeds. Times are UTC.

To release a run of chapters, one every week for instance:

  1. Open the book’s Chapters tab and tick the chapters to schedule.
  2. From the bulk actions, choose Release every N days from a date.
  3. Set the First unlock (Times are UTC) and Then one every so many days.

The first chapter in the book’s order gets the first date, and each next one the date after it. This only sets Unlock Dates: a Draft chapter stays a Draft, so publish the chapters too, or they will not appear at all. You can still move any single chapter’s date afterwards.

The Unlocks column shows each chapter’s date. At the top of the book, the strip counts the chapters Published, Scheduled and Draft, when the next one unlocks, and the words in all of them. On your dashboard, Coming up lists the next chapters to unlock across all your books.

What readers get

  • A reading time for each chapter, and an Aa button to choose the text size, line width and light or dark.
  • The arrow keys on a keyboard turn to the previous or next chapter.
  • Members can mark a chapter as read, leave a Heart, report a typo, and pick up where they left off in their library.
  • At the end of the last chapter they can read, a note says when the next one unlocks, or that the sample has ended, and where to buy the book if it has buy links.

Hearts, typo reports and reading counts

Three tabs on each book show you how its chapters are doing:

  • Chapters: the Hearts column counts the Hearts each chapter has had from Members.
  • Typo Reports: passages Members have flagged, with their note. Who sent each one is never shown. Edit chapter opens the chapter, and Resolve marks the report done.
  • Readers: for each chapter, how many Members opened it and marked it read in the last 90 days. You see counts only, never who; a visitor’s reading is never counted at all.

Limits

A book can hold 100 chapters, and one chapter up to 200 KB, which is about 30,000 words; a longer one can be split in two. See safety limits to have one raised.

Still stuck, or found something wrong on this page? Contact support.