CA: Publishing · 1:56pm Aug 19th, 2015
The first entry in my recently revamped Cumulative Advice blog has me reminding people to never, ever, ever publish part of your work before the entire story is complete.
There is a common misconception that creating a new chapter is the same as publishing it, for the purposes of exposure. This is false. No matter how long a chapter sits on your story unpublished it will still, once published, give you your front page bump. As evidence, I can point to my own stories as the chapters were all created at once, but individually published on a scheduled.
Note that: Viewing a story's index page (description and chapters) does not constitute a view for the story, only when an individual chapter is viewed does a view get generated for the story (relevant to "hotness").
As the author, you have all the time in the world to create, edit, and perfect your story before publishing it. That leaves you the grace to make any changes to a story that you need to before an audience sees it. Then once it is finished you can stagger the chapter releases so that it still gets that exposure, and your audience gets its regular content updates until the story is completely released.
That said, the story does not need to be published for editors, or proof readers, to take a look at it and some don't even like looking at it if it has been. Just provide them a link and the story's password if you've created one. But individuals filling such roles (to be discussed later in this series) often prefer versions they can annotate directly.
The consequences of publishing a story before it is complete are many and varied, and all of them have been discussed in The Writer's Group forum at some point or another. A short list includes:
* Needing to ret-con a previous chapter to make the next chapter make sense, which is normally fine, but not wanting to because someone has already read it.
* Inadvertently creating a poor expectation or one that is not maintained through out the story, which earns it a great deal of negative feedback, and potentially even many downvotes.
* Puts a lot of pressure on you (the writer), which prevents you (the editor) from really shining, and that is something that really shows through to a reader.
A lot of research has been put into this topic, though I can't verify Ocalhoun's findings, the post can be found here referenced in the TWG's forum post.