Ready for readers?Publish from where you write.

What you’re deciding when you publish

Before the first chapter goes out, there are a handful of decisions that are hard to change later. The name you publish under is the one readers will search for. The rating and content warnings shape who finds the story and whether they trust you. The licence says what other people may do with your words. And whether the story is listed decides if strangers can find it at all, or only people you send the link to.

Then there is the question of rights. Publish what’s yours to publish: your own world, a work in the public domain, or a story whose licence allows adaptations. Fan fiction of a book, show or game still under copyright is best kept private, which every Authrot project is until you choose otherwise.

A pen name readers see, and nothing else

Publishing on Authrot needs an author profile: a pen name, a handle, a short bio, an avatar and your links. Nothing public ever falls back to your account name or email, and nothing public links the profile to your account. Pen names are unique, and names that differ only by case, accents, spacing or lookalike letters are refused, so nobody can publish as a near-copy of you.

Your author page lists your published stories with their covers, genres and progress, alongside your bio and links. It stays out of search engines until it has a published story, so you can set it up and share it before launch without an empty page turning up in search results.

Choose the pen name as if you’ll keep it for years, because readers will search for it. Look it up first, say it aloud, and check the handle you want is free on the social sites you use, so readers find the same name everywhere. Pen name and handle changes are limited once the profile has settled in, and an old name stays reserved for you for a while after you change it, so a rename never hands your readers to someone else.

The details readers judge you by

Readers decide in seconds, from a title, a cover and a few lines of blurb. Authrot asks for the essentials before anything goes out: a title, a blurb, at least one genre, a rating, and content warnings (or that you choose not to give them). The tagline, cover, tags, language, progress and licence are optional, and open once the essentials are set.

Writing a blurb for your own book is famously hard. If you use the AI, ✦ Suggest drafts a title, tagline, blurb, genres or tags from your Foundations and opening chapters. The blurb is written without your ending, and the suggestion only arrives in the field: nothing is saved until you take it. The rating is always your choice. For the cover, upload one, reuse a book’s cover, or ✦ generate one, and preview any chapter exactly as readers will see it.

• Ratings: general, teen and mature
• A licence: all rights reserved, or a Creative Commons licence
• Progress: ongoing, complete or on hiatus

Your studio stays private

What readers see is a snapshot, taken when you publish or update a chapter. Your live drafts, notes, outlines, story bible, alternate takes and branches never reach the public page. Links between your prose and your bible entries are stripped from the published text, so readers can’t peek at your notes through the page.

Chapters go out in reading order, one after another, so the public story never skips a chapter. You can keep revising in the studio, then see which published chapters have changed and update them when you’re ready. You can also take the latest chapter down, or unpublish the whole story, at any time.

Ratings are easy to get wrong when you know your own story too well. When chapters go out, their text is checked, and if a chapter reads as more intense than the rating you gave the story, the Publish page offers to raise the rating and add the matching warnings in one step. The chapters are still published; the advice is yours to take or leave. Uploaded covers and avatars are screened before they go public, too.

Honest about AI

Readers increasingly want to know how a story was made. Authrot tracks AI-written text through every edit, copy and branch, along with large pastes, and the reader pages say how much of a story was AI-written. A story with none says “Human-written”, and readers can browse for human-written stories only.

This isn’t a judgement either way. It is a label readers can trust, because it is worked out from the text rather than claimed by the author. If you want the label to read human-written, turn the AI off for the project and write every word yourself. If you do use the assistant, the label simply tells readers the truth, which is what most of them ask for.

Pages built for reading

Reader pages are designed for long sessions on a phone as much as a desk. Readers choose light, sepia or dark, a typeface (including dyslexia-friendly ones), size and spacing, and pick up at the paragraph where they stopped. Each story has a feed for new chapters, a share card for every story and chapter, and its place in browsing by genre, tags, rating, length and completion.

If you narrate a chapter, readers can listen on the page. If you take support on Patreon or Ko-fi, the buttons appear on your story and after every chapter. Choose unlisted and the story is shared by link only, which suits a soft launch with your newsletter or a writing group.