Editing posted stories in fanfiction

I will give fanfiction.net some credit. They have been making a lot of changes to the site recently, some of which are definite improvements.

To those who use it, the document manager now holds fifty documents! Thank goodness. Ten was just not enough. I can’t tell you how many times I have received panicked messages from people about having to delete something from the doc manager in order to upload more content. No, deleting it from there does not delete it from the story.

But the most useful thing is a new ‘export’ feature.

I hate errors in my stories. I like to fix them if someone points them out to me. Previously I would have to find my chapter in my copy of the word document, upload it, edit it and replace the chapter content on fanfic. With over sixty stories; a lot of them multi chapter ones, that was a trial.

Now, I can go into the ‘publish’ tab; select ‘manage stories’ heading. Select the story I wish to edit. Click on ‘Content/chapters’ and it lists all of the chapters.  Next to the chapter listings are four columns, like this:

‘Edit’ only applies to renaming or editing the chapter title itself and not the contents.

The one we want is ‘export’.

Select the chapter you wish to edit. In Apologies, I had ‘shover’ instead of ‘shoved’. Just noticed it myself this morning. Ugh. Must fix that. And how did spellcheck miss that? Is shover even a word?

Click ‘export’ and the chapter will be loaded into your doc manager and labelled ‘export: chapter name & number’. Like so:

Open it; edit the way you normally would. I couldn't help myself and took out a few words, too. Click save. Then go back to the ‘manage stories’ tab. Select the story you are fixing, click on ‘Content/chapters’, click on ‘replace/update chapter’ at the top of the page, above the table. Click on the down arrows to select the chapter you are replacing and then click on the down arrow next to the ‘select document’ listing to select the exported document you have already edited.

Make sure you have it right. You know, that you are replacing ch35 with a new ch35, for example. Then click the button that says ‘replace chapter content with document’.

Done. And it took me minutes.

If you do not have a complete copy of your story, on the story properties page there is a download button. It opens a new browser page and has your whole story there. You can ctrl/A to select all and ctrl/C to copy and paste it into another format. Or you could use a page clipper function such as Evernote.

I strongly advise having back-ups of all your stories somewhere else other than only on your hard drive and hopefully also in a cloud storage like Google Drive or Dropbox or whatever. Backup people!

Cool. Thanks fanfiction.

Has anyone else noticed new features?