Your library, instalments with a voice — and publishing that always tells you it worked

Three weeks since the last issue, and if we had to sum them up in one sentence, it would be this: OutaStory now remembers what you read and listen to, always tells you whether publishing worked, and gives serial stories a voice, one instalment at a time. On top of that: a catalogue we have tidied up thoroughly, apps that no longer freeze on iPhone and iPad, a Windows app you can publish from again, and a whole row of small things you only notice when they are missing — the birthday greeting, for example.

Much of this exists because one of you wrote to us: “Nothing happens”, “The page stays blank”, “The app freezes”. We followed each of those sentences until we had the cause. This issue tells you what came out of it.

The five things that matter most:

• My Library: every story you have read or listened to, in one place — with reading progress and listening progress on the same row.
• Publishing always tells you. Every publish is confirmed, and if you write a serial, you are taken straight to the next instalment.
• Every new instalment can get its own narration — automatically when it costs you nothing, otherwise with a button that names the price first. And a new version of your story keeps the narration of the old one.
• Reading on iPhone and iPad is calmer. Nothing freezes after an ad any more, and when the app thinks it is offline, a clear “Go online” button brings you back.
• A tidier, more honest catalogue: placeholders are gone, every category has an introduction, chapter one sits right on the story page, and stories from our own AI imprint are clearly labelled as such.

My Library: everything you have read and listened to

OutaStory always knew how far you had read in a story — but there was no place where you could see all of it at once. If you had started three stories in parallel, you had to remember which ones. If you had listened to a story instead of reading it, there was no trace at all.

Now there is My Library. Every story you have opened is listed there, with two progress bars on one row: how far you have read and how far you have listened. The two tracks are separate because they are separate — if you read in bed at night and let the narration run on the train in the morning, you have two different places, and both matter. One tap on the row takes you back exactly to where you stopped.

To make this possible we now also save your listening progress per story. Until now that was a fleeting value inside the player; now it is stored just like your reading progress and follows you to every device.

And because we know not everyone creates an account right away: the library works without signing in, too. Your progress is then remembered on your device. As soon as you sign in, it is merged into your account — nothing is lost, nothing is counted twice.

On your phone the library has a permanent home. The bar at the bottom of the screen now has five entries: Home · Discover · Write · Library · Profile. That is deliberately plain: five destinations you reach with your thumb without thinking.

A sidebar with headings

On computers and tablets the sidebar has grown over the months, and with every new entry it became a little harder to read. The thin separator lines between the groups were no longer enough. Now every area has a small caption: Browse, Reading, Writer, Account, Help & Legal. You can see at a glance where to look instead of scanning the whole list.

For everyone who writes, “My Stories” is also split into two entries: Published and Drafts. What you are working on and what is already out there are two different questions — and now two different clicks.

The little guided tour of OutaStory we introduced a month ago has become more precise as well: the explanation card now sits centred next to the element it is talking about, and on the profile page it no longer lights up the entire menu, just the one entry it wants to show you.

Publishing that always tells you

When you press “Publish”, you want to know exactly one thing: is it out now? OutaStory did not always answer that question reliably. An author wrote to us that he had published and “nothing happened” — the story had in fact been online for a while, it was just that nobody told him. For someone sending off weeks of work, that is about the worst thing that can happen.

So we went through the entire path from the click to the finished story, step by step, and improved it in several places:

• Every publish is confirmed. First version, new version or new instalment: you get a clear answer and a link to your story. No more guessing whether it worked.
• The Publish button knows what is going on. While your story is on its way, it says so and cannot be pressed a second time. If a story is still waiting for a review, it tells you that too.
• A publish is sent exactly once. On a slow connection the app could retry a publish that had long since arrived — and then report that the draft was “not found”. Of course it wasn't: it had just been published. That no longer happens. Publishing, releasing and ordering narration are sent once and never retried automatically.
• What happens after publishing happens even if you close the window. After the click, OutaStory does a few things in the background: the story goes into search, your readers are notified, the preview image for social networks is created. This used to be able to break off if you left the page right away. Now it runs to completion, whatever you do.
• Before publishing, you see the age rating — and what it means. A story rated 16+ or 18+ is not visible to some readers, for example anyone who is not signed in. That is now shown exactly where you make the decision, so that it is a conscious one.
• If our terms for authors have changed and you have not confirmed them yet, you learn about it before publishing — not when it fails.

Serials: straight to the next instalment

Serial stories — we call each part an instalment — are one of the most rewarding ways to write on OutaStory: you publish week after week, and your readers wait for the next part. But the path there had a dead end. If you had prepared a new instalment, you sometimes ended up in a wizard after publishing that had no sensible way out.

Now: a prepared instalment can be released right where it is. After publishing a new version, OutaStory takes you to exactly the instalment that is up next. The release buttons always follow the actual state on the server — not whatever your browser saw last. Instalments that are already released keep their dates; nothing is withdrawn by accident.

Pasting from Word and Google Docs keeps your formatting

Many of you write in Word or Google Docs first and then copy the text into the editor. Until now, bold, italic and underline were lost in the process — we had once deliberately limited pasting to plain text so as not to drag foreign fonts and colours into your stories. In practice that meant re-adding every emphasis by hand. That was the wrong trade-off. Bold, italic and underline are now kept; fonts, colours and other clutter are still left out.

Scene breaks you can see and hear

A scene break is often a blank line or a small divider in a story: here the narrative jumps, to another place, another time. Until now that divider quietly disappeared when you saved. Now it is a real scene break: it is kept, it is shown as a small ornament when reading — and in the narration, the voice pauses for a second and a half at that point. Just as a good narrator would.

Covers that don't break the title

Two small things about covers that bothered us too: long titles were sometimes broken in the middle of a word, and the little OutaStory mark could land on top of your name. Both are fixed. The cover designer now also warns you when a text layer runs over the edge or covers another one — before the cover is published, not after.

Instalments with a voice

On OutaStory, any story can be narrated on request. For serials there was a gap: the narration was made for the story as it was at the time — and the instalments that came afterwards stayed silent. If you had listened to the first three instalments, the fourth was text without a voice.

From now on, every new instalment can get its own narration. Here is how it works:

• If your serial already has a narration and you release a new instalment, OutaStory checks whether narrating that instalment costs you anything.
• If it costs nothing, the instalment is narrated automatically — with the same voice as the instalments before. You don't need to do anything.
• If it does cost something, for example because you chose a special voice, you get a button that names the price first. Nothing is charged without your consent.
• On your story's page you can see for each instalment whether its narration is ready, in progress or still missing.

On top of that comes something that used to hurt: a new version of your story keeps the narration of the old one. If you fixed a typo or revised a chapter and published again, you used to lose the whole narration and had to start it again. Now it is carried over. An author who had been through exactly that has his narration back for all four instalments.

Narrating long stories, and pronouncing names correctly

Novels are long. Narration used to have a ceiling that was fine for short stories and novellas, but not for a whole novel. That ceiling has gone up considerably: with Premium you can have stories of up to 500,000 characters narrated, without Premium up to 200,000 characters. Roughly speaking, that is a full-length novel and a decent short novel respectively.

And then there is the question everyone knows who has ever had their own story read aloud: why does the voice mispronounce my main character? Fantasy names, invented places, a nickname stressed differently from how it is spelled — for a voice, those are riddles. Now there is a pronunciation dictionary per story. You enter a word, write next to it how it should sound, and the voice sticks to it, in every instalment, in every version.

So that you can try this before narrating a whole story, you can preview any voice with your own text — not with a sample sentence, but with a paragraph from your story. And if you would like to hear your story yourself before it is published, you can narrate a draft privately. Many people only notice where a sentence stumbles when they hear it.

For everyone who uses OutaStory through an AI assistant: narration and covers can now be fully controlled there too — choosing voices, using your own voice, seeing costs, generating cover suggestions, uploading and designing. When you publish through the assistant, your story automatically gets its category's default cover if you haven't chosen one, just as on the Publish page. And when you change a story's details there, tags, characters and the AI disclosure you didn't touch are kept.

In the apps: calmer on iPhone and iPad, publishing again on Windows

iPhone and iPad: no more freezing after an ad

A reader wrote to us that his iPad had frozen after he tapped an ad in the reader — so thoroughly that only a restart helped. We searched for a long time, because everything was fine on our side. The cause lay in how the app works together with iOS: while you are looking at the advertiser's page, the system may shut down the part of the app that displays your story in the background to save memory. When you came back, it was gone, and nothing reloaded it.

Now the app notices that moment and reloads itself, right where you were. In a second variant — a full-screen ad that could no longer be closed — the app now frees itself, and the same ad is not shown again when you page back. So that we notice such cases ourselves in future, rather than through your messages, the app now tells us when it hangs.

“Go online”: a button that actually reconnects

The OutaStory apps can read and write offline. That is wonderful on a train or a plane — and confusing when the app believes it is offline although it isn't. One reader could not open any stories and search would not accept anything; the only hint was a narrow, easy-to-miss bar.

Now there is a clear offline bar with a “Go online” button. One tap checks whether the server can be reached and switches the app back to online mode. Pages that failed to load before reload themselves. Only if the connection is really missing do you stay offline — and then you know why.

Windows and Mac: publishing works again

On Windows and on the Mac, publishing could get stuck on “Syncing your latest edits…”. One author waited half an hour. The cause was a marker: every keystroke marked your draft as “changed locally”, and even when the online autosave had long since succeeded, that marker was never reset. So the app waited for a sync that it never started itself.

That is fixed. Drafts you edited online can be published normally again on Windows and the Mac. And we reworked offline sync for serials at the same time: if you write offline on a serial that is already published, the app transfers only the instalments that have not been released yet when you next connect. Your offline text is safe, and no second version of your story quietly appears next to the published one.

New in the stores

The new versions are on their way: Android on Google Play and Windows in the Microsoft Store are on 1.9.41; iPhone, iPad, Mac and the Fire tablets follow as soon as the stores have finished their review. Galaxy Store, Uptodown and winget get every version as usual. On Android, the building blocks for purchases, ads and the consent prompt have also been brought up to date — which you will hopefully not notice at all, and that is exactly how it should be.

Reading: dark from the first moment, and no blank pages

Dark mode is now dark from the very first moment. If you use OutaStory in dark mode, you used to see a bright frame flash briefly when a page opened, before it had fully loaded. During the day you barely notice; at night in bed it is a small shock. The right colours are now set before the page shows anything at all.

No more blank pages while loading. A reader wrote to us that some pages simply stayed empty on his iPad, and suspected an age restriction. The truth was more mundane: the little loading spinner meant to show you that something is happening was built into 23 pages but had never been styled — it was invisible. On a slow connection the story page therefore looked as if there was nothing there. Now it spins, and you know the story is on its way.

More things you will notice when reading:

• Every story page now shows the first two pages of chapter one. You can start reading immediately, without switching to the reader first, and at a clearly marked point “Keep reading” carries on seamlessly.
• Tags, characters and copyright details are shown in full on story pages again. They had been lost on the way from storage to the page.
• No more stray asterisks in the text. In some of our stories, formatting characters such as double asterisks or hash signs appeared as bare symbols in the text instead of becoming bold or a heading. We cleaned them out of 955 chapters, and the preview texts on story pages no longer show such characters either.
• The animated assistant no longer crashes older browsers. If your browser lacked the necessary graphics support, opening the assistant showed an error page instead of a glowing orb. Now you simply get a calm one.

A tidier catalogue

We spent a large part of these three weeks on a question we honestly should have asked ourselves earlier: when someone visits OutaStory for the first time — what do they find? We didn't like the answer. Next to many real stories there were short placeholder texts from the early days that were never meant as stories; there were categories with nothing or almost nothing in them; and some pages showed less than they promised. We have cleaned this up thoroughly.

• The placeholders have been taken out of the catalogue. They are not deleted, but no longer public. Over time, real stories with their own titles are meant to take their place.
• Categories appear as soon as they contain stories. Empty shelves have disappeared from navigation. As soon as a story is published in a category, it is automatically back — nobody has to unlock anything.
• Each of the 22 main categories has a hand-written introduction, in German and English. If you click “Fantasy” or “Crime”, you now read a few sentences about what awaits you there before the stories begin.
• New: curated collections. Selected reading lists, put together by us, around a theme, a mood or a season. A good starting point if you don't know where to begin.
• Very short pages don't hide, but they don't push forward either. A category with only one story, a collection that is still almost empty, or a story of just a few lines stays perfectly reachable. We just don't announce them to search engines until there is more there — and that happens automatically.

Honestly labelled: the OutaStory AI imprint

Some of the stories on OutaStory were created with the help of AI. That was always visible from the story's AI label. What was not honest enough: these stories appeared under author profiles that looked like people — with names, biographies and sometimes details that sounded as if a real person stood behind them.

We have changed that. These profiles now carry the label “OutaStory AI imprint”, clearly visible on the profile and on the stories. When you read a story, you should know whether a person wrote it or whether it comes from our own AI workshop. While we were at it, we also smoothed out contradictory numbers: one profile showed hundreds of followers in the overview and zero on its own page. Now both agree.

Our editorial standards, in public

What do we publish and what not, how do we handle AI, what happens when something is reported? Until now that was spread across terms of use, help articles and FAQ. Now it has a page of its own: our editorial standards, in German and English, reachable via “About us”. It is short, written in plain language and kept up to date when something changes.

Protection from spam

An open place for writing unfortunately also attracts people who don't want to write but to advertise — with comments under your stories, or with “stories” that are really ads. We have cleaned up and made sure that this kind of thing does not become visible in the first place: comments that look like advertising, and the first stories of new accounts, are looked at by us before they appear publicly. For genuine new authors that means: your first story may not be online in the very second you press “Publish” — but it appears in a place where people can trust it. The confirmation after publishing tells you if your story is still waiting for a review.

Small things that count

• The birthday greeting arrives. If you told us your birthday, you get a little email from us on that day. That was planned and built a long time ago — but the email never arrived. First a switch was missing, then our mail service rejected it because of a duplicated setting. Both are fixed, and the first greetings have been delivered. If you had a birthday in the past few weeks and heard nothing from us: belated happy birthday, truly.
• We can now see where the app helps you. Within the bounds of our privacy policy, the apps tell us which features are used. On the web that always worked; from the apps these signals simply never reached us. Now, for the first time, we know what is actually read and listened to on iPhone, Mac and Android — and can decide what to improve next.
• For authors: advertising revenue from ads on the web is now counted in full, including the part our ad partner's report does not assign to a single page. That revenue is shared out proportionally across the stories instead of falling through the cracks. And the statement PDFs we generate for it now have everything they need.
• Behind the scenes we brought the building blocks OutaStory runs on up to date and rebuilt our nightly tests so they run to completion every night. That sounds unspectacular. But it means we see a bug the next morning, not only when you write to us about it.

Numbers at a glance

• Ten new versions in three weeks, from 1.9.32 to 1.9.42. An eleventh was stopped by a test before it could ship anything — which is exactly what those tests are for.
• Around a hundred individual improvements, from the library to the loading spinner.
• About twice as many visits per day as in the second half of September: on average around 115 per day in early October, after around 60 at the end of September. That is a start, and still a long way from where we want to be.
• 22 main categories with their own hand-written introduction.
• 955 chapters freed from stray formatting symbols.
• 500,000 characters per story can be narrated with Premium, 200,000 without.
• Six platforms, unchanged: web, iPhone & iPad, Mac, Android, Windows and Fire tablets, plus Galaxy Store and Uptodown.

What comes next

First: real stories where placeholders used to be. The gaps the clean-up left behind should not stay empty. We want to fill them with stories that deserve to be found — with their own titles and their own ideas.

Second: bringing the apps up to date. The improvements for iPhone, iPad and Mac are with Apple for review. As soon as they are approved, we will test the freeze after ads once more on exactly the device where it happened.

Third: two corners in writing that we know about. If you release an instalment and immediately keep writing in the same chapter, that can still start a new version you didn't want. And on very narrow phones, the assistant button in the library covers part of the progress display. Both are at the top of the list.

Fourth: the first euro paid out. Advertising revenue now flows into the statement in full. What is missing is the first month that runs from start to finish. We will report when it happens.

And as always: tell us what looks odd. The blank pages on the iPad, the freeze after the ad, publishing where “nothing happens”, the button that syncs forever — almost everything in this issue started with one of you writing to us. Thank you for that.

Thank you for reading, for listening, for writing and for paying attention.