Adding chapters

A chapter belongs to a novel and carries a number. Those two facts drive the table of contents, previous and next, the free opening range and every “latest chapters” list on the site.

Chapters live under Chapters in the sidebar. Chapters ▸ Add New starts one, and the novel’s own screen can start one already attached.

Novel, number, access and price

These four sit on two lines directly above the editor, between the title and the writing area. They used to be a box below it, four hundred pixels down the screen from the thing you came to write; they are a row now, with no panel around them, because nothing else between the title and the editor has one.

Novel is which novel this belongs to. A chapter without one is invisible: it appears in no table of contents and has no previous or next. The field is a search box — type into Search novels… to narrow the list — and the list scrolls at eight, so a long catalogue has more below the ones you can see.

Chapter is the number, and it is what orders everything. Numbers do not have to be whole, so 10.5 sits between ten and eleven, which is what side stories and interludes are for. On a new chapter the next free number is filled in for you. Change the novel and that suggestion follows it, so switching from a novel on chapter 40 to one on chapter 2 does not quietly leave a gap — but only while the number is still the screen’s guess. Type your own and it stays yours.

Access overrides both the novel and the site default:

The last two reveal a second field beside them — Paid for N days after release, or Paid until a date and time. A chapter the site has never classified also offers Leave as it is, which changes nothing.

It is one menu rather than the five labels it used to be, so the line under the row does the explaining: it says what this chapter’s access currently is and where that came from. Read it after changing the menu, and when one chapter behaves differently from its neighbours read it first — a setting here beats everything above it, which is deliberate and is usually the answer.

Price sits at the right-hand end, with your site’s own coin inside the box. Leave it empty and the chapter costs whatever the site charges; the box says default while it is empty. A figure here overrides that for this chapter alone.

Starting the next chapter

Two places offer it, and both go to a new chapter already attached to this novel, with the next free number filled in.

When you save. The message at the top adds “Add chapter 4 to your novel” to whatever WordPress already said. On every save, not only publishing: a writer clearing a backlog saves drafts and one filling a schedule saves future posts, and both finish a chapter the same way.

While you are still writing. An Add Chapter 6 button sits in the header beside WordPress’s own Add New. Core’s button goes to a blank chapter with no novel, which on a site with hundreds of them means finding this one again in a list.

Neither appears when there is nothing to offer — a chapter with no novel yet.

System windows, notifications and code

For stories where a System talks: level-ups, status sheets, quests, warnings, a broadcast to every player. The editor toolbar has a System menu, after the quote button. Put the cursor in a paragraph, or select several, and pick a preset: Window, Level up, Status, Skill, Quest, Item, Warning or World announcement. The paragraph becomes a window, drawn in the editor the way the reader will see it. Change the text afterwards as you like.

A preset only chooses a title, a colour and a shape. Under the same menu, Tone picks the colour (blue, red, gold, green, purple, silver, or the site default) and Alignment chooses centred, left, or full width. Window title turns the line the cursor is on into the window’s header, replacing the preset’s. Remove window puts the text back as plain paragraphs.

Status and Quest lay out lines written as Label: value in two columns, one line per fact. A line with no colon stays a sentence, so a status sheet can still carry a note.

Notification is the System’s voice without a box, for the bracketed one-liners that come five in a row. Each is its own line, so five stay five.

Code block is for pasted code or terminal text. It wraps and follows the reader’s font size instead of running off the side of a phone.

How the windows look, Screen (black glass, glowing text) or Card (quiet, in the theme’s colours), is a site setting under Theme Options ▸ Content & Features ▸ Chapter Blocks, and a novel can choose its own under Chapter formatting on its edit screen. That box also has Quotes are system windows: for a novel already written with the quote button for system text, tick it once and every blockquote in its chapters is drawn as a window, with no chapter re-edited.

Footnotes

The Note button inserts [note]Your note here[/note] at the cursor. Replace the placeholder with the note. On the page it becomes a small numbered mark; hovering or tapping it shows the note in place (on a phone it unfolds under the paragraph), and every note is listed at the end of the chapter with a link back to its mark. Notes pasted from Google Docs or Word keep their own links and get the same look.

Where notes show, tooltip and list, list only, or tooltip only, and the heading above the list (“Notes”, or “Translator’s notes”) are set under Chapter Blocks, and a novel can override them in Chapter formatting.

System windows, notifications and code

For stories where a System talks: level-ups, status sheets, quests, warnings, a broadcast to every player. The editor toolbar has a System menu, after the quote button. Put the cursor in a paragraph, or select several, and pick a preset: Window, Level up, Status, Skill, Quest, Item, Warning or World announcement. The paragraph becomes a window, drawn in the editor the way the reader will see it. Change the text afterwards as you like.

A preset only chooses a title, a colour and a shape. Under the same menu, Tone picks the colour (blue, red, gold, green, purple, silver, or the site default) and Alignment chooses centred, left, or full width. Window title turns the line the cursor is on into the window’s header, replacing the preset’s. Remove window puts the text back as plain paragraphs.

Status and Quest lay out lines written as Label: value in two columns, one line per fact. A line with no colon stays a sentence, so a status sheet can still carry a note.

Notification is the System’s voice without a box, for the bracketed one-liners that come five in a row. Each is its own line, so five stay five.

Code block is for pasted code or terminal text. It wraps and follows the reader’s font size instead of running off the side of a phone.

How the windows look, Screen (black glass, glowing text) or Card (quiet, in the theme’s colours), is a site setting under Theme Options ▸ Content & Features ▸ Chapter Blocks, and a novel can choose its own under Chapter formatting on its edit screen. That box also has Quotes are system windows: for a novel already written with the quote button for system text, tick it once and every blockquote in its chapters is drawn as a window, with no chapter re-edited.

Footnotes

The Note button inserts [note]Your note here[/note] at the cursor. Replace the placeholder with the note. On the page it becomes a small numbered mark; hovering or tapping it shows the note in place (on a phone it unfolds under the paragraph), and every note is listed at the end of the chapter with a link back to its mark. Notes pasted from Google Docs or Word keep their own links and get the same look.

Where notes show, tooltip and list, list only, or tooltip only, and the heading above the list (“Notes”, or “Translator’s notes”) are set under Chapter Blocks, and a novel can override them in Chapter formatting.

Release queue

Chapters use WordPress scheduling, and this box is where a chapter sits in the run-up to going out.

A scheduled chapter is invisible until its date, paid or not: it is not on the novel page and nobody can buy it. If you use the timed access rule, its paid period starts from that publication time rather than from when you wrote it, so chapters published in the same batch have countdowns that end together.

To sell early access (read it now for coins, free on its date), set the novel’s access rule to Sell early access to scheduled chapters and then schedule chapters as you always do. Each one is listed and locked as soon as it is scheduled, and opens for everybody when it publishes. See chapter access.

Without that rule, a scheduled chapter you make paid by hand is still hidden until its date, so scheduling for the 23rd and paying until the 23rd means nobody can buy it at all. The access box on the chapter says so when you set one up that way.

Search & Share Description

The same box as on a novel: what search engines and social cards show. Left empty, the chapter’s opening is used.

Doing this in bulk

Do not paste four hundred chapters one at a time. If they are already in .epub files, see importing an ePub. If they are on another WordPress site, see moving an existing site.