A serial is one story that grows over time, not a shelf of separate
stories. Understanding that one sentence explains everything else about
how it behaves.
One story, many instalments
Open a serial and you get a single story page: one cover, one
description, one comment thread, one place in your library. Below the
description sits the list of Instalments, in the order the author
wrote them.
Because it is one story, you also have one reading position in it —
not one per instalment. Close the app in the middle of part four and
OutaStory brings you back to that exact page, whichever device you pick
up next.
Every instalment link opens at that instalment
Tap Instalment 3 in the list and the reader opens at the first page
of instalment 3. Tap the fifth and you land at the start of the fifth.
The link knows where its instalment begins and takes you there.
That matters more than it sounds. A serial is a long single text
underneath, so "open the story" and "open part five" are genuinely
different requests, and the list answers the second one.
The same is true of the notice you get when a new part is released:
following it drops you at the top of the new part, ready to read,
not at the beginning of the story.
If you remember it working differently, you remembered correctly.
In an earlier version every instalment link opened at page one of the
whole story. Authors publishing a second part clicked it, saw part one
again, and reasonably concluded that OutaStory had republished the
wrong text. It had not — the text was right and only the landing page
was wrong. It is fixed, and the fix applies to every existing serial,
with nothing to re-publish and nothing to fix at your end.
Reading one from the beginning
Open the story and start reading. There is no separate "part 1" to hunt
for: the first instalment is simply the beginning of the story, and
turning pages carries you from one instalment into the next without you
having to go back to the list.
Use the Instalments list when you want to jump — to re-read a
particular part, or to skip ahead to the one that has just arrived.
Only released parts are there
The list shows the parts the author has released. Anything written
but not yet released is invisible: no title, no length, no hint. So the
list is always exactly what you can read right now, and you can never
accidentally open something that is not finished.
When a part is released it appears at the bottom of the list and the
count on the story page goes up.
Keeping up with a serial you like
Tap Notify me on the story page. You then get a notice for each new
part, and one more when the author marks the serial complete.
That is a separate choice from favouriting — the heart and the
Notify me button do not affect each other.
A "serial complete" notice takes you to the story page rather than
into the reader, because there is no single new part to open; it is the
whole thing that has changed.
If something looks wrong
- A part you already read appears unread. Your position is stored
per story, not per part. Re-opening the story returns you to your
furthest point, which may be inside a later part than the one you
clicked. - A new part is announced but the list has not changed. Pull to
refresh, or fully close and reopen the app — the app caches the story
page so it opens quickly. See
Troubleshooting the apps. - Two parts arrived and you only got one notice. That is deliberate:
instalment notices have a six-hour quiet period per reader, so a
burst of releases does not turn into a burst of notifications.
Related
- Stories that arrive in parts —
the full picture, including publishing one yourself. - How the reader works
- Turning on push
notifications