Chapters and Publishing
1. Making Chapters
Every story on FicMachine can be split into chapters, and those chapters can be individually published for others to read.
Splitting into chapters matters when you want to publish your story. Readers can read and interact with stories one chapter at a time. A story with no chapters is treated as having one big chapter.
1.1. Making a Chapter
To start a new chapter, type three asterisks on an empty line:
***
This is called a dinkus. Type it on a line in the editor and it turns into a chapter divider. Everything before is one chapter, everything after is the next one.
1.2. Naming a Chapter
By default, chapters are just called "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2", and so on, based on their position in the story.
If you want a title, add a markdown header (# Chapter title) right after the dinkus ***:
***
# The Long Way Home
The same works for the very first chapter too. Just put the header at the very beginning of the story, before any text:
# A Stormy Beginning
The rain hadn't let up in three days...
2. Publishing a Chapter
Splitting your story into chapters doesn't have any effect by itself. Chapters stay private, visible only to you (and the AI), until you decide to publish one.
2.1. How to Publish
Head to your story's page — click the "Details" button on the story card. Then, scroll down to the chapter list, and you'll see each chapter with a Publish button next to it.
Hit Publish, and that chapter goes live.
2.2. What Publishing Does
Once you publish your first chapter:
- Your
/storypage becomes visible to everyone, not just you. Other users can see published chapters (unpublished chapters are still only visible to you). - You story will show up on the Published page, where readers browse stories that have at least one published chapter.
- Anyone can open a published chapter and read it, like it, and see the view count.
Only the chapters you've actually published are listed and readable by other people. Unpublished chapters stay hidden.
You can publish chapters one at a time, whenever they're ready. There's no need have a finished story to start publishing.
3. Unpublishing a Chapter
There's no dedicated "unpublish" button right now — the way to unpublish a chapter is to delete the *** marker that ends it.
If you delete a chapter break, the two chapters on either side of it merge back into one. If that break belonged to a published chapter, you will be asked to confirm your deletion.
Make sure that's really what you want, because:
Deleting a published chapter's dinkus permanently loses that chapter's likes and view count. Once the marker is gone, there's no chapter for those likes and views to belong to anymore.
If you undo the deletion right away (Ctrl+Z) before exiting, the chapter will come back as it was (likes and all). However, once it's gone and saved, it's gone for good.
4. Editing a Published Chapter
Any edits to a published chapter (content or title) will appear live immediately after the story is saved.
5. Content Moderation
The same Content Guidelines apply for published chapters and scenarios.