Publishing a Story (Menu Changes)

There does seem to be a visual (or maybe more) change when you go to submit a story. Now you publish a story and there is a submenu.

I have not seen any explanation on the site that these changes were happening and what they changes mean.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

There's been an update over on Stories Space (which is no longer the blue site, they changed the styling) so might be the same one. Don't have the details handy, but there have been some changes re. story publishing. Hopefully Jen or someone posts the details soon.

The intent of the changes was to make the story publication process clearer. Here is a rundown:

When you write a story, the Save button does just that: it saves where you are as a Draft and the story will show up in your Stories>Drafts area. Your editing session will remain on the Write panel so you can keep saving as you go.

The arrow alongside the Save button offers further resources that may help during the writing process: tips and links to forum threads to ask for advice/help, or to read about how others have approached storytelling.

Once you have added all the necessary fields, information at the bottom tells you the benefits of adding optional fields. Up to you if you choose to follow the advice.

When your story is ready, hit the Preview button. That will take you to a screen showing you what your story will look like on the site when published. This step helps because, sometimes, copy and paste from word processors or text editors can have unintended consequences in published material. For example:

1. Indenting lines can sometimes render an entire paragraph indented as a block quote.

2. Newlines / hard returns can creep in, which give the text random line and paragraph breaks.

3. Hidden control characters copied from a word processor can sometimes render chunks of the story in bold or italics or in an odd paragraph style.

Etc...

So scroll/read through your story preview and check it looks good. It's your opportunity to make sure the cover looks fine, the one liner reads right, the title and tags are spelled correctly, the story body text is formatted nicely, and so forth. If there's anything not quite right, you can go back to the draft and fix it prior to final submission.

Once you're happy with your work, hit the Submit button from the Preview panel and the story will be sent to the moderation queue.

That's it for editing/submitting, but there are are a few peripheral extras now too:

A) Your draft stories are linked to the Edit step from your profile, allowing you to jump right back into editing mode.

B) If your story has not yet been locked by a moderator (i.e. it is still in the general queue) you can recall it back to your drafts and make changes. Handy if you spot something like a typo or incorrect quote mark/punctuation you missed first time round. Once a story is locked by a moderator, it cannot be recalled. Edits can only be made after publication or after it has been returned for further work.

C) If you send a link to any of your draft stories to someone else, they can access it. Handy for getting assistance from editors.

That pretty much sums up the changes. Hope it helps.

Yay! Awesome and quite helpful improvements for authors!

Yes, I think so too.

There are a couple of minor glitches that crept in (tags not always saving, and picture lists not being scrollable on some devices) but fixes should be forthcoming for those.

Thank you for the full explanation WW. It is appreciated.

I do have a small suggestion, Is it possible to put a pre-warning note on the forum when noticeable site changes are going to be made?

I am pleased that I have seen this thread because, unusually for me, I have not written anything for about 3 days and I have no stories in preparation.

Seeing this will hopefully save me from wondering what is going on when I next start (and complete) another story.

This is great news! Thank you! Much like the way it used to work, only better

Quote by wxt55uk

Thank you for the full explanation WW. It is appreciated.

I do have a small suggestion, Is it possible to put a pre-warning note on the forum when noticeable site changes are going to be made?

i have to agree - even i had no idea of this change - i tired to submit a story - i fucked around with it for like 30 minutes, had to re-do tags several times, ended up with 9 drafts which it wouldn't let me delete - eventually i published it - i have no idea how i did. it just happened. it left me very frustrated - previously it would just give me a publish button which i'd hit and it would be done. not a happy camper right now.

I have today commenced writing a new story, my first since the changes.

Having seen this thread, little has come as a surprise to me and the changes seem to make things easier BUT if I had not seen this thread I would have been somewhere on the forum asking what is going on very soon after I started the story.

As has been said, prior warning of this might have been a good idea.

Using a draft of my comp entry to test it out (I do my actual writing in Google Docs then copy over). So far, I quite like the changes. Some good stuff there.

Quote by PJH
As has been said, prior warning of this might have been a good idea.

Advanced notice of updates seems to be a communications weakness with the management right now. They changed the colour scheme on Stories Space without notice so I went in one morning and was wondering if my screen was f-ed or something.

I love it. I've accidentally hit "Publish" when I meant to merely save and this helps keep that from happening. Nice change, more intuitive, wasn't hard to figure out what was going on.

Did my first publication using the new system and quite liked the experience. Seems to work fairly well and has some definite improvements. Good job. 👌😊