What a Member is
A Member is a reader who has joined your site. Joining is free, needs only an email address, and has no password. A Member belongs to your site alone: someone who joins two authors’ sites has two separate memberships, and nothing is shared between them.
Anyone can read what you make Open without joining. Members are for what you keep for them: Members only chapters, and Members only downloads.
How readers join
- A reader presses Join on a Members chapter, or Sign in in your site’s menu.
- They type their email address and press Email me a link.
- We email them a link to sign in. It works once, for the next 15 minutes.
- They press the link, then the Sign in button on the page it opens, and they are back on the page they came from.
They stay signed in on that device, so most readers do this once. To sign in somewhere else, or after signing out, they ask for a new link the same way. The join page tells them plainly that there is no password, and that you can see the address they join with.
If a link has not arrived, the reader should look in their spam folder, then ask for another. One address can be sent 3 links an hour.
What Members get
- Your Members only chapters, in books set to Full reading mode. See chapters.
- Your Members only downloads, while the book is in Full mode. See books and series.
- Your library: every book they have started on your site, how far they have read, and a link to continue.
- Mark as read on each chapter, a Heart to leave, and Report a typo to send you a passage that needs fixing.
Your Members list
Go to Site → Members. The list shows each Member’s Email, the day they Joined, and when they were Last seen on your site. Members join themselves: you cannot add them or change their details.
Download CSV, at the top of the list, downloads a spreadsheet of every Member’s email address and the date they joined. The same file is in your site’s export, as members.csv.
Members are not your mailing list
Joining your site is not the same as signing up for your newsletter. Only add a Member to your mailing list if they have agreed to it, for instance by also signing up through your newsletter block. Draft Margin never emails your Members anything except the sign-in links they ask for; to tell them a chapter is out, use your own mailing-list service, or let them follow your feed.
Removing a Member
Press Remove beside a Member. They are signed out at once, and their reading records, Hearts, typo reports and download counts are deleted with them, so your counts go down by theirs. They can join again later with the same address, starting afresh.
What you can see about reading
Each book’s Readers tab shows, for each chapter, how many Members opened it and how many marked it read in the last 90 days. It shows counts, never who read what. After 90 days without a visit, a Member’s reading is kept only as part of those numbers. A visitor who has not joined is never counted.
Typo reports reach you without the name of the Member who sent them. Hearts show as a count on each chapter.
If something seems wrong, such as a Member who is clearly a spam account, remove them, and tell us if it keeps happening.
Limits
A site can have 5,000 Members. When it is full, new addresses cannot join, but every existing Member can still sign in. That limit, like the others, is raised on request: see safety limits.
Still stuck, or found something wrong on this page? Contact support.