[Note: This was taken from Alfonts' step-by-step.]

After reading the guide, if there are any further questions or comments, feel free to PM me or any of the mods, or post in this topic only. All uploading and posting issues are only to be discussed here. Also, if you find the guide confusing or whatever, just let me know!

Contents of this post

I. Posting a new story

II. How to add additional chapters

III. How to edit stories

IV. Solution to uploading problem

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I. Posting a new story

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1. Break up the chapters into individual files on your computer. This is the single easiest way to create different chapters. I recommend you simply start a new document whenever you start a new chapter.

2. Upload these files (via your document manager) to the website.

i. Log in.

ii. On the left, click "Documents".

iii. Down the bottom you will see three fields to fill out. They're pretty self explanatory: 'Label' (this is so you can identify your chapter after you've uploaded it, don't bother with file extensions as they sometimes confuse the system); 'File on computer' (click "browse" to select the file you wish to upload); and 'Format' (you can choose between 'Story' and 'DocX', and a little box below these fields explain what these two words mean).

iv. Click "Submit Document".

v. You should now see the file in the "Document Manager". (Little note on what the 'Life' column in the document manager means: it tells you how many days your document - not your story - stays in the document manager. After a certain number of days the document will be automatically deleted, however this does not mean your story is deleted. Putting your document in the document manager does not mean you have posted your story yet.)

3. Click on "Stories" on the left.

4. Click on "New Story" at the top right.

5. i. In the text-box there will most likely be a message stating that you have not agreed to the guidelines, even if you have previously, if it was longer than 7 days ago you need to do it again.

ii. Click the underlined "Guidelines".

iii. Read them (they tell you what sort of stories and what sort of fandoms are not allowed) and scroll to the bottom of the page to click on "I accept".

6. Click "New Story" again. What follows is some very basic step by step instructions. When you're filling out the fields, the only one that might be might be misleading is "Document". This seems to be where many people make their mistake. You can only select a file you have already uploaded to your "Document Manager" (That was step 2, so if you've been following this guide you should be covered!), it does not allow you to take them straight from your computer.

7. Click "Submit Story". You now have a story on FF.net.

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II. How to add additional chapters

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1. Upload the next chapter if it's not in your document manager (steps 1-2 of part I).

2. Go to "Stories".

3. Click on "List Stories" (you should already be there).

4. Click on the "edit" button sitting on the right of the details of the story you want to edit.

5. Click on "Content/Chapters", it's near the top.

6. i. Simply fill out the appropriate fields and click "Add".

ii. If you wish to replace an existing chapter (which I will look at in more depth under "editing"), simply fill out the fields under that heading.

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III. How to edit stories

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Unfortunately editing is a bit of a pain of ff.net, so here's a brief guide as to the quickest way to do it.

1. Click on "Stories".

2. Click the "edit" button of the story you wish to edit.

3. Here you can make any superficial changes to the story (title, summary, rating, etc.) Remember to click "Save changes" at the bottom when you are done.

4. To make changes to the actual content of the story, click "Content/Chapters" near the top of the page.

5. Next to each chapter you will see four buttons. I will explain each of these in turn:

Edit: NOT how you change the content of the chapter, simply used to change the chapter title and it's position. Simply click it, make the changes then click "save".

Delete (del): Pretty obvious. Delete the chapter.

Export (exp): Very useful, moves a copy of the chapter to your document manager. A copy of the chapter you export also remains where it is, you can replace it later.

Backup (dl): Bring up a page with only the text of your story on, convenient for copying and pasting back into word (or equivalent).

6. What you do next depends on how much editing you have to do. If you only have to change a few typos, then it's probably easiest to do it in the editor provided in the document manager:

i. Click "Export".

ii. Click "Documents".

iii. Click "Edit/Preview" for the chapter required.

iv. Make the changes.

v. Click "Save changes".

vi. Follow the steps for "adding a chapter" above, simply selecting to "replace" the chapter you have edited.

If you have some heavy editing to do (entire passages for example), you will most likely prefer to do this in word (or equivalent) on you computer. If you have a copy saved to your hard drive that is exactly the same as is up on the site, then simply edit on your computer and resubmit it. Follow the instructions for "adding a chapter", using step 6 ii).

i. Click "backup"

ii. In the new window simply highlight the text (or press Ctrl + A)

iii. Right click anywhere on it

iv. Click "copy"

v. Open up a new word document

vi. Right click in the blank space (or click "edit")

vii. Click "paste"

viii. Make your changes, remembering to save them at the end

ix. Follow the instructions for "adding a chapter", using step 6 ii)

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IV. Solution to uploading problem

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This is not a solution to every uploading problem, just general ones that people seem to come across often. Sometimes the site just bugs up completely and there's nothing anyone can do but wait for them to fix it, but you can report problems to them here: support at fanfiction.com (for some reason I can't post e-mail adds).

The first thing to always do is try and send it as a plain text file...I don't know why, but that does seem so solve a surprising amount of troubles.

Did you click upload and come up with a blank screen? This bug happens pretty frequently, but we've found a way around it. Although, it can only be used if you have at least one chapter previously submitted. If you're submitting your first chapter (i.e. creating your first story), then there's not a lot I can really suggest, other than: wait for the bug to sort itself out. Otherwise:

1. Log in and go to your page.

2. Click "stories".

3. Click on the title of any story you have there, it doesn't matter which one.

4. Click "contents/chapters".

5. On the right, next to each chapter, you'll see the four buttons I've previously mentioned. Click on "exp" next to any chapter. Again, it doesn't matter which one. Now you'll have a document in the document manager. I'll note again that by clicking export a copy of the chapter goes to your document manager. The actual document remains where it is.

6. Click "Documents" on the top left.

7. There should be a copy of the document you exported sitting there. Click the "edit/preview" button.

8. Now you simply highlight all the text and delete it.

9. Open up the new chapter you wish to add in whatever word processor you use, and cut and paste it into the document you have open.

10. Click "Save Changes"! Believe me, you'll kick yourself if you forget.

11. Simply place this document that you've made into whatever story you wish, simply treat it as a normal document in your manager and, if necessary, follow the instructions in previous parts of this guide.

In the document manager a list is given of which tags (when html coding your document) FFnet allows. Those are for linebreak (starts the next word on a new line), bold, italics, underline, horizontal line (to indicate a transition of scene), and paragraph. (code (between the pointy brackets): br, b, i, u, hr, and p). [html code is easy enough to learn. Upload a document, and go to edit. Look at what Ffnet does to your document under the html tab].

To avoid ffnet bunching all your text together you should put a blank line between paragraphs (hit enter twice) or use a "hard" enter (press shift+enter).

I remember that a while back ffnet had a little trouble with word docs. It may have caused the layout problems you had. That problem should be fixed now.

For Mac you can use any program that can save documents in the formats that FFnet allows for uploading:

# + OpenOffice (.sxw, .odt)

# + NeoOffice (.sxw)

# + Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)

# + WinWord, WordPad (.rtf)

# + StarOffice (.sdw)

# + WordPerfect (.wp, .wpd)

# * HTML (.htm, .html)

# * Plain Text, NotePad (.txt)

There is a link to NeoOffice for Mac on the frontpage of FFnet. There is Microsoft Word for Mac, but you have to pay for that. Besides, NeoOffice can save documents in Word format if you want. So can the AppleWorks program you probably already have on your Mac.

Title

by author

but what i end up with is

Title

by author

how do i fix that?

My other question is, why won't it let me use the character @ in the story? If it matters, i use microsoft word

Title by author

FFnet bunches everything together if you don't double space. So if you want a single space you should hold the shift key while hitting the enter key. This will leave you with a line break that FFnet recognizes.

No, you can't do @ in a story. FFnet strips e-mail addresses from stories (to avoid spam and stuff). Contacting the author can be done through the profile. There is no other reason to have an @ in the story. If you are using it because one character tells another character an e-mail address you can write out the @ the way you would say it yourself (I doubt there is a sound for @). So: thisperson at thatdomain dot com

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Is there any way to stop or prevent that?

So, uhm, patience little grasshopper.

Hope that helps. If it didn't, could you be more specific about what kind of problem you run into. For instance: do you get an error message?

Argh. But fast-forward has ALWAYS been hyphenated, and I refuse to use a space instead of a hyphen!

And yes, it may take a while for a story to show up.

I use & ndash; all the time in my fics, but I've never tried putting one in the summary.

And this HTML 4.0 Character Entity Reference shows how the named and decimal character references look in one's browser

http://www.alanwood.net/demos/ent4_frame.html

I have a story, that its chapters are not being ended that way. Instead it's "Back to top" which doesn't work when I click on the link.

How do I fix this?

What Hollefine said was: if you want to view your story in the same layout as other people's stories you have to access them in the same way. So go to the category where your story is listed, or to your profile page, and click the link to your story. That should show the chapter map and review button at the bottom.

Here's a brake-down of what I did and what happened:

1- I logged in

2- I clicked on "stories"

3- I clicked on "new stories"

4- I clicked on "first step: click to select category"

5- I clicked on "books"

6- I looked through the list and the book "shane" wasnt there, and there was no option for making your own book link

Do I have to not include that story because it doesn't belong anywhere, or is there a solution?

Hope this makes sense, and thanks for all your help.

If your choice of fandom isn't there (and in the case of books it some times helps to look under both the name of the author and the name of the series) you can post your story in the miscellaneous section. So Misc. books is for stories in book fandoms that don't have their own category (yet).

To request a new category you can send a message to support@fanfiction.com

Thanks.

There are certain forms of formating FFnet doesn't allow. Asterikses are part of that. FFnet does allow underscore. I've seen it in a fic fairly recently. (Just checked the document formating: it still has a button to underscore text). So, I don't know how you underlined your text, but a single line underneath the text should work.

Check the "I have a question" thread for a list of the other symbols FFnet doesn't allow (they're listed somewhere in the first post), and for other questions you might have.

If it's not a crossover, I wouldn't. I really wouldn't. Sure, loads of people post non-crossovers in that section...but just click on a few of their reviews. You're highly likely to get flamed and reported for site abuse.

Misc. Books (in the Books section) is a much better general place for it.

But, I mean, not underlining text, but just putting an underscore in, like you would for a smiley (Sorry if that's what you meant).

There's a work around in there.

Also, a smile is not text, so shouldn't really be in a story.

Other people's stories show up in the "all" section.

You gave a detailed breakdown of editing chapters that have been posted in a story, but I recently started writing a lot of oneshots and found a couple of small mistakes in the last one I posted. I would like to fix them, but I've seen people do that before with oneshots and they end up losing all of the reviews for their story or else having the story deleted and resubmitted. Is there a way to fix the typos and mistakes in my oneshot without having to resubmit the story or lose the reviews it received? Will the method given in the first post work for stories that only have one chapter?

Again, sorry if this is a silly question, but I've been stressing about this for a short while and would really appreciated some help. Thanks in advanced!

I uploaded to about 15 documents and I was wondering...do I need to delete a few documents to make more room?

As far as I know the chapter replace function replaces the chapter and does not delete the story entirely. I have a few one-shots, and I'm sure I've tried to upload corrects in a few of them.

Another option is to post the corrected chapter as chapter two and after that delete chapter one. That way your corrected story also gets marked as updated and bumped up to the top of the list of stories.

Thank you - I didn't know about the "export" back function to get a story back to document. But my question was really will the reviews be lost if a I replace a story or chapter ?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: it's been reported that sometimes if you only have one chapter the reviews disappear. I've never experienced this myself with editing my one chapter story and it's not supposed to happen.

I don't know if anyone's said this, but the document manager and even forum post reply now have these really helpful things such as spell check and formatting and etc. So yeah, that's it.

I don't know if anyone's said this, but the document manager and even forum post reply now have these really helpful things such as spell check and formatting and etc. So yeah, that's it.

I thought I mentioned it in the new thread I created, but it was merged into another thread on a similar topic and was lost - so it's worth mentioning again!

1. I encourage anyone who is using Firefox, to install their regional english's dictionary and to turn on the inline spell check.

2. I encourage anyone who isn't using Firefox to install Firefox and go back to point 1.

3. I encourage anyone who refuses to see the sense in points 1 and 2, to utilise FF.net's new spell check and preview features BEFORE pressing submit in the forums, and on their stories if they're not using a word processor to write, spellcheck and edit for grammar already (which you should anyway).

I'm not disagreeing with you on the spell-check issue, but my biggest problem is the words spell-check misses.

For example: using "your" when you meant to use "you're", or "too" when you wanted "to". Plus the occasional random one where you used "late" instead of "hate". All are legitimate words, but not the ones you intended to use. Therefore, I find it quite handy to be able to go back and correct those mistakes when I spot them days or weeks later in my posted stories.

Haha, thanks so much ! It was so nice of you, I had been wondering for the past half hour how to do it and you told me everything.. THANKS SO MUCH !!! :)

Thank you for the guide! I appreciate it very much. I can finally download/upload my stories. Have a great day! And again, thank you!

-harvestingNarutos

Hello, I'm new here. I registered a few days ago, but I've got some trouble uploading documents in my documents section.

When I try to upload one through the document manager, It gives me the following message.

"Empty Document

doc You have uploaded an empty document or there was an error in processing."

I've uploaded one on another computer, from work. I can't understand what's going on. I'm using Vista, and I tried both with Maxthon and IE, and it still won't work.

Can someone help me, please?

When I try to upload one through the document manager, It gives me the following message. Empty Document doc You have uploaded an empty document or there was an error in processing."I've uploaded one on another computer, from work. I can't understand what's going on. I'm using Vista, and I tried both with Maxthon and IE, and it still won't work.

There's so many things it could be. Let's start with: What kind of document format are you trying to upload? If FF.net's server doesn't recognise the file it might spit out that error. Make sure your document is as devoid of Word styles as possible. Use only the paragraph style (no headings etc), and only use italics, bold and underline as text styles.

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