This week I'd like to talk about two of the new features coming to the site soon.  I've shared this a bit with the authors, but I wanted to share them a little wider.  This is a more focused view for readers.

We currently have one way for authors to group their stories: Series links.  They work, but I've wanted them to be more obvious.  So, with the new version, we're giving a bit more depth to our Series.

Series now has a description.  We can also add a series banner and special enhanced displays for series that have special circumstances.  Authors should take note of the red Xs on the side.  We can now very easily remove stories from a series (and yes, it asks to confirm the delete, so no accidents) or reorder the stories by simply pressing the up and down arrows.

But a series of stories isn't the only way to group stories in the next update.  As anyone who has ever read Tom Clancy, Mercedes Lackey, J.K. Rowling, or Rick Riodan knows, you can have a whole bunch of different series featuring different aspects or couples that all take place, along with stand-alone stories, in the same world.  And hence, the next new feature: Worlds.

Worlds function almost exactly like Series, except that there is no order like in a series and you can add Series to your world.  For the sharp-eyed readers here, you will spot "Contributors".  For the purpose of this demonstration, I added dkstories' Dreams of Humanity Series to my Psionic Corp world.  Series listing also allows contributors, though I didn't show it in the example above.   Also in the picture, you can see that Series has one highlight color (black currently) and Worlds another (Violet, currently).  Also, Dreams is tagged with Premium, so that is also listed.  I see this feature getting used for authors who share the same writing world or for authors like @Comicalityand I who write stand-alone stories that share the same area.   In the example, you see two of my Anthology entries which are stand-alone entries in my Psionic Corp world. 

Good news too, current existing stories in a series will import in as is.  The Author or staff members will just need to go and add a description to the series page, and it'll be good.  (if one isn't added, it'll just look as it does now)

The browse menu will now have a "Browse by Series" and "Browse by Worlds", as you can see in the right-side menu in the above image.

There are other things coming as well.  But as you can see from the screenshots, the test server already has these features working