Do you publish one chapter at a time or save a bunch of chapters as drafts until a milestone is complete and publish them all at once? Which method is preferred?
I think releasing them as they're done is usually the right strategy for the sake of exposure as you'll get more eyes on it at the front page. The exceptions would be: 1) if it's a game mode story where a person could become trapped on a route instead of being able to loop back to a hub and keep their progress. In those cases, I like to build it out to a good stopping point before I release, just out of courtesy to readers. 2) if you're submitting the story for the first time, in which case it's ideal to have several chapters for a person to read right away and judge by, instead of just a single chapter. None of that's hard rules, of course, but I do think releasing the chapters as your done usually makes sense!
I've tried out both methods and here's my experience with either: The pros of publishing multiple chapters at once is a captive reader. You'll most likely have them read everything you've published since, like you said, it's probably a full arc that has a beginning, middle, and end. At least if you're doing a linear story. Readers appreciate that sort of thing. Instead of having to wait for the next chapter and possibly not remember what happened previously if the gaps between publishing times is long, resulting in readers possibly forgetting about your story and dropping it entirely for something new. If you're a like-whore, like me, publishing individual chapters has its pros. I noticed when I published chunks, some readers would only like the last chapter while during the period I started uploading individual chapters, they liked every individual chapter uploaded. So now, I'm not sure if they just didn't like the chapter for its content, or they didn't like it because it was uploaded as part of a chunk. It could just be conjecture, but it's a reoccurring thing for me that I experienced with multiple readers. It's not a big deal if you don't care about likes or use likes to analyze what your reader base is into, but MidbossMan had a good point that separate uploads puts your work on the front page more, for more exposure as well. It's why I switched to uploading individual chapters instead of chunks. What I do currently is a combination of both. I still write in chunks and save them as drafts, but upload the chapters individually when I've reached the end of a short arc or scene. It keeps the scene consistent since it gives me a chance to proofread, while still getting that front page exposure time and making sure the gaps in uploads is short so readers won't completely forget what happened previously.
This is 100% what I do. I will usually write a few chapters at a time, and then release them one by one. I think this helps keep my arcs more consistent, and it makes editing much less stressful since I only edit 1 chapter at a time. As an added bonus it also gives me time to take a mental break if I run into writers block.
This is where I'm at, too. I write several chapters in advance and then roll them out one by one each day. I try to avoid times and days I've determined are high publishing days, so my content will stay on the front page longer. I don't actually know if the front page works this way. Although I'm currently trying something new experiment. I'm writing a complete story thread (with a proper ending!) and plan to publish it all at once. Once it's up I'll start building new branches off the complete story.
